Spring XD is a unified, distributed, and extensible system for data ingestion, real time analytics, batch processing, and data export. The project’s goal is to simplify the development of big data applications. This post introduces some of Spring XD’s basic concepts by walking through one of our most popular demonstration applications, the Analytics Dashboard, which best shows off some of Spring XD’s out-of-the-box features for real-time analytics. The post shares real code examples to create streams and taps on a Twitter feed to populate counters and gauges.