Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in wet and wonderful New York City. It's already almost tax-day here in the US! Whew! time is sure flying. Other (markedly more pleasant) annual landmarks will soon be here, including our big SpringOne Platform event, so book your tickets now!

Also, I'll be joining my friends Simon Maple, Daniel Bryant, and Markus Eisele for a webinar on microservices on April 19th - join us! It should be fun and - hopefully - interesting!

As usual, we've got a lot to cover so let's get to it!

• Spring Data Hopper went GA! This release includes 395 tickets closed and represents a substantial body of work! Get the bits and try it out now!
• Spring Integration and general messaging ninja Artem Bilan's just announced the first milestone in the Spring Integration Kafka 2.0 series. This release represents a complete rewrite of the support provided in Spring Kafka based on the Producer and Consumer APIs in Kafka 0.9x. Check it out, kick the tires and give feedback!
• Spring Cloud Stream lead Marius Bogoevici just announced Spring Cloud Stream 1.0RC2. This release includes support for the ObjectMapper when converting objects, header embedding and better documentation.
• Spring Security and Spring Session lead Rob Winch has just announced Spring Session 1.2.0 RC2
• Spring framework lead Juergen Hoeller has just announced Spring Framework 4.3 RC1. This is the first feature-complete Spring Framework 4.3 release candidate and it's available now, loaded with new features! Check the blog for the details, get the bits and kick the tires! Do not miss this!
• Spring ninja Greg Turnquist has just announced Spring WS 2.3.0. Many older dependencies have been updated and this reflects a major update. Make sure you've referred to the changelog.
• Saving one of the best SpringOne2GX replays for last, in this case from the amazing Matt Raible - don't miss Eliminating XML in Your Spring Projects
• John Davies from C24, an longtime partner of the Spring team, and a leading expert on Spring Integration, data technologies, and Financial Services, talks about Microservices to FastData in the Enterprise with Spring
• Don't miss Stephane Maldini, Glenn Renfo, David Turanski showcase some of the earliest work around reactive processing in spring, as they discuss Spring XD's High Performance Stream Processing
• Xavier Padró's just put together a blog on data aggregation with Spring Data MongoDB
• I really enjoyed this talk from Domain Driven Design author Dr. Eric Evans
• Benedikt Ritter has put together a nice blog introducing Spring Boot's @ConfigurationProperties
• Joris Kuipers, a longtime friend of the Spring community, has written a nice blog on session control in a concurrent environment with Spring Session
• I loved James Ward's blog post on bootstrapping a complete Spring Boot development experience, from code to cloud, in under ten minutes