Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! We've got a lot to cover so let's get to it!

• Spring Data lead Oliver Gierke just announced Spring Data SR2 which includes 40 issues fixed and includes an important update to the support for JTA 1.2's @Transactional
• Spring Security lead Rob Winch has just announced Spring Security Kerberos 1.0.1 which includes Spring Security 4 and LDAP 2.0 support, as well as a fix for an issue.
• Spring Security lead Rob Winch doesn't sleep so he also just announced Spring Security 3.2.8
• Not resting on his laurels, Spring Security lead Rob Winch also announced Spring Security 4.0.2 which - among other things - includes numerous bug fixes, support for Spring framework 4.2, and minor improvements to Spring Security itself including a status code returning HttpStatusReturningLogooutSuccessHandler
• Our pal Dan Woods wrote up a very nice post on using Spring Boot with Ratpack for InfoQ. Check it out!
• Want to learn more about Spring Boot and Spring Cloud? I enjoyed these slides from our pal Eberhard Wolff
• Spring XD co-lead Dr. Mark Pollack just announced Spring XD 1.2.1 which includes support for registering custom Kryo Serializers, along with configuration options to tune Kryo performance, updates of several components including Spring Integration, Spring Boot, and Reactor; an updated Admin UI, and improved pagination for containers and jobs.
• I don't speak the language, but I had a few people tell me they liked this Ukranian language talk on Spring Cloud by Igor Khotin given at JEEConf in Kiev, Ukraine. Check it out!
• John K. Waters put together a nice post on how Pivotal is leading the cloud native application revolution with, among other things, Spring Boot and Spring Cloud
• Rambabu Posa has a nice post on using the Spring Initializr to get started with Spring Boot
• Our pal at the all and sundry blog are back it again! (I missed Biju's posts of late!) This latest post is on using Spring Boot's @ConfigurationProperties.
• I errantly forgot to include the link for the item above so when I was Googling to find the link again, I stumbled upon this oldie-but-a-goodie on using RxJava's Observable in a Spring MVC flow