Thursday, January 23, 2014 - 3:00pm GMT Time (London GMT) closed as of Jan 20th Thursday, January 23, 2014 - 10:00am PST (San Francisco, GMT-08:00) registration open

Happy New Year! Welcome back to this year's final installment of This Week in Spring! We'll do some of the news, as usual, and then I'll take a look back over the last year in news surrounding Spring, of which there's been much indeed! Matt Raible, who we know has also been looking at Spring Boot, just wrote up our just-released Spring 4 for InfoQ. Definitely worth a read if you have the time! Xavier Padró has a nice post on retrying web service operations with RequestHandlerRetryAdvice. There's a great discussion on Stack Overflow on Spring's CrudRepository vs. the more JPA-specific…

Happy holidays! Hopefully with the holiday season comes some time off, and a chance to relax and more fully catch up on fun stuff you missed during a busy year. Readers of this column will know there are many channels for developers learning about Spring, and studying the field of technologies that Spring supports. Don't forget about our SpringSource YouTube page, Twitter account, our 15-30 minute "Getting Started" guides, the blog, and of course our Facebook and Google+ pages. I personally want to go back and watch as many SpringOne2GX talks on the YouTube channel as I can. Remeber JHipster…

All Spring and Groovy books half price on special deal days, to celebrate the Spring Framework 4.0 launch, Pivotal is sponsoring Spring and Groovy day in Manning's Countdown to 2014! On certain deal days like Monday Dec 9,10; Thursday Dec 12, 13; Monday Dec 23, 24; and Thursday Dec 26, 27, you can get any of Manning's Spring and Groovy books for half off-eBook, pBook, or MEAP. Just go to Manning.com and choose any (or all) of these selected books. Enter gpivdotd13 in the Promotional Code box when you check out to get the discount. BONUS: If you register for Manning's Countdown to 2014, you…