Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! We've got a lot to cover, so without further ado, let's get to it!

1. Spring XD co-lead Dr. Mark Pollack's just announced that Spring XD 1.1 RC1 is now available! Now's the time to get the bits, try it out and see if there any gaps!
2. If you've been reading the amazing Dr. Syer's blogs of late, you'll know that he's been introducing people to how to use expose and secure REST services for a UI client. The fourth post looks at how to insert an API gateway between the clients and the backend service. The fifth post then introduces OAuth as a drop-in replacement for the bespoke authentication session tokens being used. If you're not following this series, do go back and reread them. This series treats a subject that I get asked about all the time.
3. Sabby Anandan is joining us for the Spring XD 1.1 launch webinar on Tuesday, Feb 17th - Spring XD: A Platform for data at scale and developer productivity
4. I hope you'll join me for a fresh look at the HTTP session with the Spring Session project on Tuesday, February 24th, 2015
5. The Simplicity Itself blog has a nice treatment of the topic of service discovery and registration and includes a nice look at various service registries, Consul, Eureka, and Zookeeper. Spring Cloud includes support for Consul, Eureka, and ZooKeeper.
6. This week, we're lucky to have the founder of the Spring Social Slideshare project, Tadaya Tsuyukubo (@ttddyy), introduce the project to us in this guest post.
7. The good Dr. Syer (@david_syer) has just announced Spring Cloud 1.0.0 RC2 is now available! The new release improves the security integrations, and cleans up some of the starters. This ship is saling to 1.0 quickly! Check out the bits while you can!
8. Speaking of Dr. Syer (@david_syer), he also just announced Spring Security 2.0.6.
9. Check out Dr. Paul King's SpringOne2GX 2014 talk on manipulating databases with Groovy
10. Disid have announced Spring Roo 1.3.1, including numerous bug fixes and some tweaks.
11. Check out Grails project lead Graeme Rocher's SpringOne2GX 2014 talk, Making Spring Boot Even Groovier
12. Spring Data ninja Thomas Risberg's SpringOne2GX 2014 post. Introduction to Spring for Apache Hadoop, is also now available online. This is a great place to get started with Spring and big-data.
13. Groovy project lead Guillaume LaForge's talk, Groovy in the Light of Java 8, is now available online. Check this out to understand where the two languages are similar and where Groovy leaves Java 8 in the dust
14. Spring Data lead Oliver Gierke just announced that Spring Data Evans SR2 and Spring Data Dijkstra SR5 are now available! This release includes a lot of improvements, so an upgrade is recommended!