Hi Spring fans! Welcome to another rip-roaring installment of This Week in Spring! I'm writing this in an Uber en route to the airport to get to awsome Atlanta, GA, for Devnexus 2026! Who's goin'? You goin'? We - the Spring team - will be there in force! Come say hi at the boothes or come see our many, many talks there!

Anyway, I've got a flight to catch so let's dive right into this wonderful week's roundup!

• this post is really cool: want to make your run-of-the-mill Spring Boot + Tomcat + JPA applications scale a lot higher? Upgrade to Spring Framework 7.0.6, and check out this wonderful blog looking at some low-touch and very useful advice
• in this post, I look at how to use Device code authorization in an OAuth context to secure Spring Shell (CLI-powered!) applications
• I did a video that looked the new Spring gRPC 1.0
• Baeldung has a nice post on the new MCP annotations in Spring AI
• want to learn how to use - to consume - Anthropic Skills from a Spring AI application? Want to make their deployment, packaging, and reuse even easier? Check out Spring AI and the new Skillsjars project
• the Spring Data team is making it easier to reference properties through typed expressions when building queries
• in last week's installment of A Bootiful Podcast, I talked to John Willis, author of "Rebels of Reason".
• an interesting blog indeed: how to use Spring AI and Azure OpenAI
• if you're using Embabel, the agentic framework built on top of Spring AI, then check out this awesome post talking about agent memory
• our friend Siva has a new Anthropic skill you can use to make writing sensible, Spring Modulith-based applications a snap
• you've heard that we developed the official Java MCP SDK, yah? It was recently ranked as tier 2 across all the SDKs.
• not to do with Spring, per se, but interesting: a look at agentic patterns