Welcome back to another installment of "This Week in Spring." Today saw a new sunrise, and - more importantly - the release of vSphere 5, the next step in cloud infrastructure! My head's still buzzing after the excitement that accompanied this morning's launch. This - and the recent release of vFabric 5 - represent the next stage in cloud innovation, and a huge part of taking your applications to production, and to the cloud, with Spring.

Lots of great stuff this week, as usual. When we compile this list, we trawl the internet looking for interesting stuff and try to bring it to you, digest style, in this weekly roundup. Some of the resources that we commonly check are Twitter, the SpringSource blogs, CloudFoundry.org, and Tomcat Expert, We try to not miss anything, but we might. If you know of something that we've missed or think should be included, don't hesitate to ping your humble editors with any suggestions.

We are pleased to announce that Spring AMQP for Java 1.0 RC2 is now available. In addition to a few bug fixes, this release provides the following: Since this is intended to be our final pre-GA release, please take some time to try it out. In fact if you have a chance, really try to push the limits so that we know we're ready for prime time. Thanks! The Spring AMQP Team

Welcome back to yet another This Week in Spring. SpringSource is out in full force at JAX San Jose this week and we will be at OSCON, in July. These events are great avenues for us to connect with the userbase. As usual, we've got a nice complement of stuff to cover this week, so let's get to it! Spring Data JPA (formerly, "Hades"), RC1 has just been released! It features, among other things, improved repository interface programming model (transactions at implementation, no need to extend JpaRepository anymore), improved parameter binding for created queries, performance improvement in…

Spring 3.1 M2 represents a marked improvement in core Spring, as well as Spring MVC! Rossen Stoyanchev chimes in to introduce the numerous (truly, you'll need to read the detailed blog to get an idea - I won't even bother trying to enumerate them all here!) new features in Spring MVC 3.1 M2, including XML-free web applications on Servlet 3.0 containers. Check it out!

Mark Fisher and Ramnivas Laddad's webinar Spring From Zero to Cloud in 60 Minutes is available online. This webinar is a breakneck-speed tour of some of the Spring, Spring Roo and Grails support on CloudFoundry. Check it out! Before you start watching, however, quickly signup at CloudFoundry.com to get access to the public, free-beta cloud service. If you want to checkout the code and learn more, check out CloudFoundry.org.

It's May, already! Seems like just yesterday we were toasting the arrival of the new year... As they say, time flies when you're having fun! This year's been a roller coaster - exciting news and events every day - too much to keep up with, certainly! This was just put up today, and is now one of my favorite blogs introducing CloudFoundry; it's so ambitious, just like CloudFoundry itself! Recently, SpringSource put up a survey about dm Server and Virgo usage. The results of that survey are available here. If you're like me, and you've been using and advocating Spring and the Spring projects…