Welcome to another installation of This Week in Spring! Here in the US it's the week of Thanksgiving, where - hopefully - we take a moment to note the many things for which we're thankful. I'm sure I speak for the whole team here at Pivotal when I say: we're thankful for you, dear community. Thank you.

And so, as usual, we've got a lot to get to it. All the better, in fact, for the lazy hours after turkey!

• Dr. Mark Pollack has just announced the release of Spring XD 1.3 GA and Spring Flo for Spring XD 1.0. This is a huge release! Spring XD 1.3.0 supports job composition DSLs, Spring Flo for Spring XD, an improved Admin UI, Spark 1.3.1, updates to the Spring Data and Spring for Hadoop distributions, a Cassandra Sink and much more! It is also the last in the line before Spring XD completes its journey to the archhitecture already partially laid out in Spring Cloud Stream and Spring Cloud Dataflow! This is an exciting evolution of the technology!
• Spring Security and Spring Session lead Rob Winch has just announced Spring Session 1.1.0.M1 complete with a lot of new features: searching HTTP sessions by username, HttpSessionListener support, customized Cookie creation, overriding the default RedisSerializer, and Hazelcast configuration and support.
• the amazing Andy Wilkinson just announced the Spring IO Platform 2.0.0.RELEASE! The Spring IO platform is a great way to mange your dependencies, in the same way that the Spring Boot dependency management section does, but with an eye towards supporting a) longer terms of stability and b) supporting all Spring projects, not just those supported by Spring Boot. It's a wonderful solution for managing applications.
• Spring Statemachine lead Janne Valkealahti has just announced 1.0.1 which includes a new @EnableStateMachine annotation, updates to 4.2.2, and several fixes.
• friend to the Pivotal community Dan Vega talks about his just released Udemy course on using Spring Boot
• Mattias Severson's post explains how to use the Gradle Spring Boot plugin to ensure that a project a project - that doesn't otherwise use or depend on Spring Boot - gets the same versions as if it did
• This slide deck Cool Web Apps with Spring Boot, AngularJS & TypeScript by Kai Toedter seemed pretty interesting!
• the Stormpath Java developer evangelist Micah Silverman just blogged about their new Stormpath Spring Boot auto-configuration. The slides are available online, as well
• Activiti ninja Joram Barrez blogged about the recent addition of the Activiti auto-configuration to the Spring Initializr, complete with a cool demo!
• Dan also did a nice video about one of the features in Spring Boot 1.3 that's sweeping the nation: the color ASCII art banners!