Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring where, with 2016 just around the corner, we'll look at some interesting news from the last week and we'll take a moment to review another amazing year in the Spring and Pivotal ecosystem.

Now let's look at an short-and-sweet list of the latest-and-greatest from the last week:

• Got a Amazon.com gift card burning a hole in your pocket from the holidays? Well, fret not, I've got just the thing for you! At long last, Spring legend Craig Walls' epic Spring Boot in Action is available! Get it while it's hot! GO GO GO!
• Netflix's Genie, which is a job scheduling and resource management layer for big-data jobs based on Spring Boot has just recently cut over from Swagger to Spring REST Docs
• Christoph Burmeister put together an introduction to building a fullstack web application with Spring Boot
• This Portuguse-language post looks at starting a new project using the Spring Tool Suite and Spring Boot
• This Spanish-language post looks at how to stand up a Spring Boot web application with Thymeleaf views, secured with Spring Security
• This Chinese language post also looks at how to get started with Spring Boot
• our pal Petri Kainulainen is back at it again, this time with a post on using Spring Boot to generate .pdf documents by shelling out to wkhtmltopdf
• Jakub Narloch has a nice post on using Spring Cloud Zuul to create a Trie matcher
• Simon Baslé's just announced the first release candidate of Spring Data Couchbase 2.0! Get the bits and kick the tires while you can! The corresponding PR for support for Spring Data Couchbase in Spring Boot has also been updated
• Check out this post to learn how to use the community project, Spring Data JDBC

It's helpful to keep things in perspective; while every week has brought us something interesting, some things stand above the rest and are worth revision here, in This Year in Spring.

• in April of this year, we announced Spring Cloud 1.0 complete with support for service registration and discovery, client-side load-balancing, circuit breakers, microproxies, and so much more. Spring Cloud builds on Spring Boot and has been embraced wholeheartedly (and publicly) by the likes of Netflix, TicketMaster, Alibaba, and many more.
• just before SpringOne2GX 2015, we announced Spring Cloud Data Flow, the decomposition of the technology in Spring XD into small, Spring Boot-based microservices and auto-configuration. Spring Cloud Data Flow builds on top of Spring Cloud Stream, Spring Data and Spring Batch to easily compose and control big data jobs and streams.
• Spring Boot 1.3 was released almost a year after the release of Spring Boot 1.2, in November 2014. The release is packed with all sorts of new features including numerous new auto-configurations, strong support development-time conveniences like live reloading and, of course, the amazing color banner ASCII artwork!
• In November we released the long-awaited Pivotal Cloud Foundry 1.6 which builds on the latest and greatest improvements to the Cloud Foundry OSS code, including the Diego scheduler which supports running Windows- and Docker-based workloads, and adds in the powerful Spring Cloud Services which make it dead simple to standup infrastructure like service registries and configuration services, among other things.
• We announced MicroPCF, which is the simplest way to get a local-node Pivotal Cloud Foundry-like experience that's familiar for developers and administrators alike

Thanks for tuning in and don't forget to join us again next week where we'll kick off the new year and mark five years of This Week in Spring!

On behalf of the Spring and Pivotal teams, HAPPY NEW YEAR!

** No ninjas were harmed in the making of This Week in Spring