Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! There is a lot to talk about, so let's get to it!

• First, the big news! Spring framework lead and OG Spring Guy Juergen Hoeller just announced that Spring framework 4.2 RC1 is now available! This new release includes lots of amazing new features so be sure to check it out! It includes anotation detection on Java 8 default methods, annotation-based application events, first-class annotation attibute aliases, nest path processing for direct field binding, data binding and conversion for JSR 354 (money and currency), Hibernate ORM 5.0 support (via JPA and natively), a STOMP client for use over TCP and WebSocket channels, Listenable/CompletableFuture as a message handler return value, CORS and declarative HTTP caching support, and much more. Get the bits, try it out, let's make sure this is the best release yet!
• Spring Cloud Connectors lead Scott Frederick just announced that the Spring Cloud Connectors 1.2.0 RC1 has been released. The new release includes many, backwards compatible, changes and upgrades including support for HikariCP as a connection pool and a fix that removes the dreaded ClassNotFoundException in certain rare circumstances! This upgrade is definitely worth an upgrade!
• Spring Data ninja and Spring for Apache Hadoop lead Thomas Risberg just announced the last planned Spring for Apache Hadoop milestone release before 2.2.GA in approxmately 2 weeks. This release includes Cloudera CDH support, Hortonworks HDP 2.2 and 2.2.4.0 support, an updated Kite SDK, improvements to HDFS writer to support syncable writes and a new timeout option, and - usefully - this release requires Java 7 or greater.
• Check out Marius Bogoevici and Dr. Mark Pollack's amazing webinar on reactive pipelines with Spring XD and Kafka from last week! Even if you saw it, you'll want to check it out again. This one was filled with good stuff.
• Your humble author has been honored with the title of Java Champion. This title is bestowed on those who help advance the Java platform and nominations are made by other Java champions. It is a rarified group and I don't know that I'm worthy. I only mention it because it is the camaraderie I share with you - the most amazing community in the world - that makes it fun and exciting to keep doing it. Thank you my friends. This Week in Spring is an almost 5 year chronicle of all the amazing things the community does to teach and inspire me and others. Thank you!
• ChargeAhead has an interesting two-part video of building a Spring Boot-based Spring MVC application. Here's part 1 and here's part 2.
• Driss Amri

put together a nice post on getting started with Spring Security, Spring Session and Redis

• Jose Diaz put together a video on using Angular.js, Twitter Bootstrap, Spring MVC, Spring Data and Spring Security together
• Spring Cloud product manager Matt Stine put together a wonderful look at Spring Cloud in this InfoWorld post
• The Learning the code way blog has a post on how to configure Spring Batch's metadata database