Egads! Can you believe it's already almost the end of the year? Time has been screaming fast! It's the week of Thanksgiving for those of us in the United States. This is a wonderful time of year to sit back, find a nice Spring IO guide or blog to read, and then build something awesome.. oh, and it's an ideal time to spend in the company of friends and family and to reflect on those and that for which we're grateful. I'm sure I speak for the Spring team and Pivotal at large when I say that we're grateful for you, our inspiring community, users and customers.

But if you do want something to read, too, we have quite a roundup this week! So, without further ado..!

1. Spring Integration ninja Artem Bilan just announced the Spring Integration Java Configuration DSL, 1.0.RELEASE! Hurrah! This release has been a long time in coming, and I hope you'll check it out! Artem Bilan Gary Russell have done an amazing job bringing this API to fruition. Check the blog for a list of resources you can consult.
2. Spring XD co-lead Dr. Mark Pollack just announced Spring XD 1.1.M1 and 1.0.2. 1.1 is marching towards GA and offers support for Apache Spark, Python, Apache Kafka, improved HDFS sink functionality, LDAP authentication, Java configuraton, Redis and JDBC sources, and Zookeeper. And that's just for starters! The good doctor briefly hints at what'll be coming in the next pre-1.1 release! Read the blog for more and for details on what's available in 1.0.2!
3. Spring Boot co-lead Phil Webb just announced Spring Boot 1.2.0.RC2, packed with lots of new features! Try it out and kick the tires now!
4. I wrote about some of the new features in Spring Boot 1.2 designed to support common Java EE APIs like JAX-RS and JTA and the new support for Undertow HTTP engine which powers RedHat's WildFly application server.
5. The DISID corporation has just released the first release of Spring Roo under their leadership, 1.3, which brings complete JDK 8 support for both Spring Roo and Spring Roo-generated applications.
6. ZeroTurnaround's Adam Koblentz and I did a webinar introducing how to use Spring Boot and JRebel to reduce iteration time with reloadable classes.
7. Check out this replay of Ben Hale's SpringOne2gx 2014 talk, Creating REST-ful, Hypermedia-based Microservices with Spring Boot.
8. Matt Stine's 2014 talk on developing PaaS-ready microservces with Spring and Cloud Foundry is also online.
9. Cornelia Davis' SpringOne2GX 2014 talk on running Spring applications in the cloud (like Cloud Foundry) is also online.
10. Watch Spring ninja Greg Turnquist build and run a REST service based on Spring Boot in 5 minutes. Why? 'Cuz he can!
11. I gave a quick interview just after speaking at Geekout UK on all things Spring, Cloud Foundry, microservice and more. Check it out!
12. Check out this interesting series on building microservices for PaaS by the Cloud Foundry ecosystem partner ActiveState. The first article is there, scroll down for the next installments in the series.
13. Want to understand the differences between ZookKeeper and Netflix's Consul? Check out this neat slide deck by Ivan Glushkov. 13.
14. Our pal Simon Maple over at ZeroTurnaround put together this look at how to quickly build a Spring Boot application that talks to Facebook, quickly
15. Jacob Severson over on the Object Partners blog has a great post on using the Reactor project (and Spring Boot) to build a UDP service
16. Check out this post on the All and Sundry blog on how to persist HTTP session state in a backing store like Redis using Spring Session.
17. Check out this blog on how to setup HTTPS using embedded Apache Tomcat with Spring Boot.
18. Check out this Chinese-language introduction to using Spring Security.
19. AirPair has a very interesting post on using Java 8 Streams to stream data back to the client for memory-intensive usecases.

As we head into the Thanksgiving holiday here where we'll load up on Turkey and then binge-watch Netflix, remember that new estimates suggest that Netflix takes up 9.5% of upstream traffic on the North American internet. Don't even ask about downstream! To learn about the microservice stack (including Spring and, increasingly, Spring Boot) that Neflix uses to scale and to learn how to integrate it all with Spring Cloud, check out this webinar that I delivered a few months ago! Once the turkey's done, then come the sales! China just celebrated a similarly major shopping event where one online e-tailer, Alibaba, raked in $9.3 BILLION in sales in one day building atop Spring. I wrote about their crazy scale in a blog a last year, Spring at China scale.

Thank you and happy Thanksgiving!