Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I am in Cincinnati and Columbus, Ohio, and Los Angeles and San Francisco, California talking to customers and doing meetups.

This is my favorite time of year! As we lead to SpringOne Platform, there's so much good stuff being released that one can hardly keep up! I am really looking forward to this year's SpringOne Platform show, coming in early August. It's an amazing time to build applications, and SpringOne Platform is in a unique position to capture the larger discussion: why do we #devops, #cloud, #agile, or #microservice? Join the discussion August 1-4, 2016 in beautiful Las Vegas and let's find out!

So, let’s get to it!

• Spring Integration and messaging ninja Artem Bilan just announced Spring for Apache Kafka 1.0.2
• and Spring AMQP 1.6.1
• I love this tweet from Spring Boot ninja Stéphane Nicoll ‏explaining that Spring Boot 1.3.7 will release the same day as Spring Boot 1.4.0.RELEASE, July 28th, just in time for SpringOne Platform!
• I like this Spring Boot tutorial, though I disagree with one claim. Spring Boot is about reducing the time to develop applications compared to all technologies.
• Our buddy Eugen Paraschiv has put together a nice look at Spring Boot's starters
• Eugen also put together a great look at configuration in Spring Boot
• want to build Java EE and other types of applications quickly with Spring Boot and NetBeans and Docker? I like this cool post on JAXEnter
• Dave Burke put together a nice look at consuming RSS feeds with Spring Boot
• Have you seen the new Spring Boot features in IntelliJ 16.2?
• Pascal Alma is continuing his look at deploying applications based on Spring Boot to AWS. In the first installment he showed the easy approach, using BoxFuse, and now he is spelling out the most painful approach: using AWS directly to deploy Spring Boot applications manually. (Or, you could just use Pivotal Web Services and run cf push -p my.jar myapp and be done with it!)
• I dig this talk on building cloud native and secure applications with Spring Boot