Happy holidays! Hopefully with the holiday season comes some time off, and a chance to relax and more fully catch up on fun stuff you missed during a busy year. Readers of this column will know there are many channels for developers learning about Spring, and studying the field of technologies that Spring supports. Don't forget about our SpringSource YouTube page, Twitter account, our 15-30 minute "Getting Started" guides, the blog, and of course our Facebook and Google+ pages. I personally want to go back and watch as many SpringOne2GX talks on the YouTube channel as I can.

1. Remeber JHipster? Julien Dubois's Yeoman-powered code generator for Spring applications? Well, 0.0.6 has been released and it has no required Spring XML (and Java EE's web.xml's the last one!) and provides code-generation support for services.

• You may have noticed we've got some new Getting Started guides, including one on Consuming a RESTful Web Service with rest.js.
• Want to use Zero Turnaround's JRebel, the live class reloading technology, with Spring 4.0.0.RELEASE? Use JRebel 5.4.3-SNAPSHOT (201312032038).
• SD Times has an interesting look at the Spring 4.0 release. Mostly analysts perspectives, less tech.
• Roy Clarkson put together an awesome Getting Started guide on how to use Spring Boot (and by extension Cloud Foundry!) to effortlessly host static files (like JavaScript, CSS and .html template.
• Petri Kainulainen put together a very nice post on how to invoke a Spring Seurity-secured method from a @Scheduled-job in Spring.
• Spring Data lead Oliver Gierke has moved Spring Data REST to the JSON representation HAL as the default format. HAL has become very popular since Spring HATEOAS's inception and is now a leading choice in the community.
• Are you into machine-learning? Here at GoPivotal there's a lot of that going around - especially with our open-source centric big-data toolset - and I've found the Meta Optimize QA site to be very helpful in learning/getting answers. . This is just an FYI, and not strictly related to Spring...
• A new cut of the Thymeleaf templating engine is available that works with Spring 4. Nice job, check it out!
• Viral Patel has a nice blog on manipulating HTTP cookies with Spring MVC.
• Spring Mobile offers a convenient way to build mobile form-factor-specific versions of an application. Part of this support is a facility for switching between experiences and maintaining state about the users preferences for their experience (e.g.: "Switch to Mobile site"). Check out this great Getting Started guide on the subject.
• Application Development Trends has an interesting, analyst-y piece on Spring 4.0's release recently. Worth a look.
• Spring Integration lead Gary Russell has just announced the second milestone (first public one, too!) of Spring Integration 4.0. This release features, among other things, the first cut of the API to rebase on top of Spring Framework 4, and build on top of its Spring Integration-inspired messaging APIs (including Message, and MessageChannel).
• Apache BigTop founder Roman Shaposhnik just joined our team here at @GoPivotal. Can't wait to see what's coming!

If you celebrate something in the next week, then happy and healthy holidays to you! C'ya next week, on New Year's eve!