Welcome to another installation of This Week in Spring! This week I left Tokyo, Japan, and have been in Shanghai, China, speaking to a few large-scale startups - including Ele.me, the largest food delivery service and application in a very crowded Chinese market with more than 2 million orders every day - about building cloud-native applications using Spring Boot, Spring Cloud and Cloud Foundry! Tomorrow, it's off to Oslo, Norway, for the amazing JavaZone conference. I love this conference and have, in the last two years, been unable to attend because it was concurrent with SpringOne2GX! Happily, this year it is not, and I'll be passing through on my way to Washington DC and SpringOne2GX 2015, this Monday!

The Spring team is hard at work this week preparing for SpringOne2GX 2015, starting next Monday, and so this week's seen a ton of exciting new releases! We're all excited for the next week and we hope to see you there!

Finally, it is my pleasure to share that my dear friend Kenny Bastani, who I asked to be the co-author of the upcoming book, O'Reilly's upcoming Cloud Native Java, joins my team this week as the first new Spring Developer Advocate. I hope you'll join me in welcoming him to the community and family!

• Spring Data ninja Christoph Strobl put together a nice post on what's coming in Spring Data Gosling
• Spring ninja Stéphane Nicoll just announced Spring framework 4.2.1 is now available!
• Spring Boot co-founder and all around nice guy Phil Webb just announced that Spring Boot 1.3.0 M5 is now available
• Spring Security lead Rob Winch just announced some updates to Spring Security LDAP
• Spring Web ninja Rossen Stoyanchev announced Spring Web Flow 2.4.2
• Spring Statemachine lead Janne Valkealahti just announced 1.0.0.RC1 - get the bits and kick the tires!
• Our pal Ken Kreuger has put together a Spring Cloud tutorial on Udemy!
• Dave Burke's put together a nice post on one of my favorite Spring Boot features, CommandLineRunner
• This Czech-language post on running Spring Boot applications on Openshift looks pretty interesting!
• Speaking of which, Red Hat also did a blog on running Spring Boot applications on Openshift this week! It is nice to see the likes of Red Hat talking about our cloud native technology stack.
• Tomasz Nurkiewicz has put together a really cool blog on monitoring the startup progress of a Spring Boot application. Of course Spring Boot applications typically take less than three seconds from java -jar .. to handling requests, as he points out, but it can be helpful to get visibility into this progress!
• This video on Spring Boot web looked pretty interesting!