Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Los Angeles, speaking to large companies who are looking at building their next-generation architectures on top of Spring and Spring Boot, in particular. Oh, I also go to visit the super cool Pivotal Los Angeles office!

• Spring Data Hadoop ninja Thomas Risberg (who, by the way, was one of the original authors on JdbcTemplate, among his many other claims to fame!) has just announced Spring for Hadoop 2.0.RC3. The new release grows the set of supported Hadoop distributions and includes support for YARN, which you can see in action in some of our Getting Started Guides.
• Spring Integration 4.0 is a major upgrade - the new 4.0 release offers full support for Annotations and Java Configuration + some Spring Boot support! With 4.0, you'll be able to make XML - free integration applications. Join project lead Gary Russell taking you through all the new hotness in the webinar, Spring Integration 4.0, the new frontier, on May 13.
• Spring Framework 4.0.4 is a maintenance release with some minor dependency updates, and is recommended. Update the version and mvn clean install/gradle package now!
• The new Spring Data release, Spring Data Dijkstra RC1 (named for Edsger W. Dijkstra), is finally here, and packed full of awesome features! One of my personal favorites is the ability to return Java 8 Optional values in a repository. I put together an example here. The new release train is huge, and includes a few (historically exclusively community-driven) modules like Spring Data Cassandra, Spring Data Solr, and Spring Data Couchbase. Don't miss it!
• The new 3.5.1 release of the Spring and Groovy/Grails Tool Suites are now available. The new releases are packed with new features, updates and a new baseline so check out the release notes.
• Groovy 2.3 is here! (just go read and download, now!)
• The amazing, and sleepless (I'm sure of it! Just look at the blogs he's released!), Rob Winch just announced the first milestone of Spring Security 4.0.0 featuring testing support.
• Spring HATEOAS 0.11 is now available, and features an API for client-side service traversal called Traverson.
• Spring Data Neo4j lead Michael Hunger and I will be giving a webinar on the new awesome in Spring Data Neo4j 3.0 and Neo4j 2.0 on May 20th.
• Not skipping a beat, Xavier Padró has put together a very nice post on using Spring Integration's Java API.
• Spring framework ninja Stéphane Nicoll has just put up a nice blog post introducing the annotation-driven JMS support in the upcoming Spring framework 4.1.
• Want to learn more about Neo4j and Spring Data Neo4J? There's a nice little tutorial on JavaBeat about Spring Data Neo4j. The English is a little choppy and the code examples are garbled with noise, but I think you should still be able to get the gist of it. If you want a more contemporary, Java-centric alternative, check out these guides on using Spring Data Neo4j and using Spring Data Neo4j with Spring Data REST
• If that's still not enough Neo4j, if you're in the Bay Area, then you might want to checkout the meetup that Spring Data Neo4J lead Michael Hunger (and I) will be holding this Thursday, May 8th!
• My pal Andy Piper and I gave a talk at SpringOne2GX 2013 about running and writing Spring applications on Cloud Foundry. Check it out!
• Scott Frederick and Cornelia Davis introduce how to add custom services and runtimes to Cloud Foundry in this amazing talk from SpringOne2GX 2013.
• Did you check out the new Project Reactor release? The new release is packed with cool stuff (including API improvements, a general-purpose object pool and a lot more!) and it paves the way for Reactor 2.0, which will base its Promise and Streams support on the Reactive Streams proejct. Nice!
• Phil Whelan over on the ActiveState blog has a nice post introducing buildpacks. Buildpacks came from Heroku, but of course you can use them in Cloud Foundry and - as with ActiveState's own Stackato project - they work with projects that are built on Cloud Foundry.