Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! As usual, we've got a lot to discuss so let's get to it!

Last week I was in Paris, France, for Devoxx, FR, and this week I'm in India for the Great Indian Developer Summit and for some meetings ahead of the conference in Bangalore and Hyderabad. If you're in Bombay, Hyderabad, or Bangalore, and want to talk Spring, Cloud Foundry, and big-data, let me know!

In a week and some change, I'll be in Barcelona, Spain, for Spring I/O. If you're in Spain, be sure not to miss this amazing event! I, along with many other members of the Spring team, will be there and looking forward to seeing you!

• Want to learn more about the cloud, microservices, and building cloud-native applications? Be sure to check out the action-packed CF Summit schedule, complete with a keynote by Cory Doctorow!
• Spring Data ninja Janne Valkealahti just announced the release of Spring Statemachine, a generic API for building, you guessed it, state machines. This is extracted from Spring for Hadoop, and can underpin lots of other projects where the correct movement from one state to another is particularly important, like in distributed, asynchronous scenarios.
• Done with the microservices hype? Then let's get practical on April 21st. I'll be talking about how Spring Cloud integrates service registration (e.g.: Eureka, Consul, or Zookeeper), declarative REST clients (with Netflix's Feign), reactive programming and the circuit breaker pattern with Hystrix to support easy, robust service-to-service invocations.
• Marius Bogoevici and Mark Pollack are teaming up for a webinar on Tues April 28th about Reactive data-pipelines with Spring XD and Kafka, a must for any big / fast data enthusiasts.
• last week I had the pleasure of speaking on the Virtual JUG again. This was my second time speaking there. Last year I gave my talk, Building Bootiful Applications with Spring Boot and had a lot of fun. This year, almost a year later, I was elated to be invited back to give another talk, this time on Building Bootiful Microservices with Spring Cloud. The fine folks at ZeroTurnaround who sponsor the vJUG even did a followup interview with me and a writeup of the post. It was an honor and a pleasure to have been able to present, so thanks for having me vJUG!
• There are some great Groovy and Grails-related SpringOne2GX replays available! Check out Lori Hotari's talk, Performance Tuning Grails Applications to get a deep dive into Grails performance bottlenecks. Check out Grails ninja Jeff Scott Brown's talk, Runtime Metaprogramming with Groovy, to learn how Groovy enables more dynamic APIs than Java through advanced features like metaprogramming. Bobby Warner's talk, Groovy Mobile Automation, to dive into the iOS and Android functional testing world using Groovy, Spock and Gradle. Want to learn more about Grails' GORM? Check out Grails project-lead Graeme Rocher's GORM deep-dive and go beyond relational data.
• Earlier this year, we at Pivotal announced that we'd open-source the entirety of our big-data stack. We're moving forward at a nice clip. A part of that comittment is donating Gemfire to the Apache Foundation where it's been renamed Project Geode. We've got the project page and a source download available already so check it out! A proposal has been submitted to The Apache Software Foundation to incubate Project Geode. Until such time as ASF agrees to incubate Project Geode, source code is available via an evaluation-only EULA.
• Sergei Egorov's post, Spring Boot's fat .jars vs. Docker, is full of win! It is a look at how to cache shared artifacts commont to different microservices so that Docker images can benefit from a shared base Docker image. Nice post and definitely worth a read!
• Our pal Matt Raible wrote up a nice post about his recent Denver JUG presentation on JHipster, a Yeoman code-generator that generates a Spring Boot-based backend and a JavaScript-based frontend. The slides, his attire, and everything else make this a must-read post! :D
• Speaking of JHipster, check out this post from Driss Amri, which looks at how to start a modern Java project using JHipster. This post looks at generating the Angular.js and Spring Boot-based application and then taking advantage of some of the Boot-powered integrations for metrics, security, and deployment. Nice!
• I'm not sure I'd recommend this, but it is an interesting read: How to Run Multiple Spring Boot applications in the same JVM.
• This post - JPA productivity boosters for Java EE made me giggle, but it's pretty darned awesome. It's a look at how to make data-access with stock Java EE (but without using Spring, which seems to miss the point!). The first installment highlights the Spring Data CDI integration.