Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! It's been a busy week indeed since we last spoke! Last week I was in Amsterdam for the IntelliJ IDEA conference and for the JSpring event in Utrecht. Now, I'm in Tokyo, Japan, for the JJUG Spring 2025 event. Importantly: both of these are Java events that take place on or around the spring season in the northern hemisphere, and are not (just?) about Spring Framework. Funnily enough, though, I did get a kick out of seeing this article of Spring creator Rod Johnson presenting at JSpring in Utrecth 20 years ago!. The more things change...

Anyway my friends, we've got a ton of stuff to dive into this week so let's do.

• In last week's installment of A Bootiful Podcast, I talked to IntelliJ IDEA lead Aleksey Stuaklov
• InfoQ has a nice look at Spring creator Rod Johnson's new Embabel framework, which is a framework for building agentic systems and services and which builds on Spring AI
• seven tips to improve the startup time for your Spring Boot applications
• Interesting! The GraalVM team are working on a new effort, Project Crema, which lets you dynamically load and evaluate classes at runtime in a native image.
• Interesting! RAG with Java and Spring AI
• also: I wrote a post looking at how to build Production-worthy AI with Spring AI 1.0
• A nice Japanese-language post introducing Spring AI's support for building Model-Context Protocol services
• A quick introduction to Spring AI
• Here's another nice piece on Spring creator Rod Johnson's new agentic framework, Embabel
• I love Confluent Developer Tim Berglund's post introducing MCP