Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! It's been an exciting week for Spring at Pivotal, which you can hear more about at the re-scheduled Pivotal launch event on April 24th.

1. In case you are reading too fast, Pivotal has re-scheduled the launch event to April 24th. Register here!
2. Arjen Poutsma has announced Spring Web Services 2.1.3.RELEASE. The new release mainly consists of bug fixes, for the full details check out the changelog.
3. Don't miss the upcoming Webinar with Donald Miner and Mark Pollack discussing Pivotal HD and Spring Hadoop, a good introductory webinar for those that are Pivotal HD-curious.
4. New SpringOne2GX replays now available in HD on YouTube: Cloud Foundry Architecture, Effective Design Patterns in NewSQL
5. There was a great post on Reddit the other day that explains the difference between REST and SOAP in terms of Martin Lawrence. This has nothing to do with Spring, but was droll enough that it's worth sharing.

     Spring, of course, has an amazing REST stack and I highly encourage people to check out how to build consolidated, streamlined REST services with Spring! Moving on... :) 
   

6. James Rossiter has a good post on how to use a Spring InitBinder to Resolve Type Mismatch and bind Exceptions in POST from Spring MVC to Controller Actions.
7. @olivergierke brings up a great point on Twitter: how much code does it take to add the JTA 1.2 JSR javax.transaction.Transactional annotation to Spring? Almost nothing! Most of the code here is just unit tests. Otherwise, this is just a dead simple mapping of the JTA annotation to Spring's already supported engine, which also currently supports the native Spring @Transactional and @javax.ejb.TransactionAttribute annotation.
8. Are you looking into Gradle and want to get started with Spring, quickly? Giancarlo Frison has put together a nice post with a bootstrap Gradle build that can be used with Spring applications.
9. Eugen Paraschiv has put together a nice post on how to use RestTemplate to do HTTP BASIC authentication.
10. Spring has long supported a utility class, called the org.springframework.util.StopWatch, which can be used to measure the execution of method invocations. The Javarevisited blog has a

      <a href="http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1rKtfP/javarevisited.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/how-to-measure-elapsed-execution-time.html">nice post on how to use the <CODE>StopWatch</code> class</a>.
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11. This post is fairly old, but I just stumbled upon it and thought it was a well thought out presentation introducing Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) in Spring.