This Week in Spring - July 7th, 2026

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! We've got a lot to cover and I've got a plane to catch so let's go!

• What's that over on Spring Initializr? It's JobRunr, that's what! My favorite distributed job execution engine has (finally!) landed on my second favorite place on the web (after production!): start.spring.io. Welcome, JobRunr!
• I love Craig Walls' recent post on using more than one LLM with Spring AI
• Nice article on using Spring for Apache Kafka with Kafka Streams' dead-letter queues
• I really liked this talk from Moritz Halbritter, on the Spring Boot team, exploring how Spring Framework 7 and Spring Boot 4 help identify and eliminate null pointers
• The Spring Cloud Contract has been an important tool for developers to ensure their services match a particular contract, and it's now transitioning to a new home at Stubborn.sh
• In last week's installment of A Bootiful Podcast, I talked to Spring Framework and Spring AI contributor Sebastien Deleuze
• Nice tutorial on the MCP annotations in Spring AI
• I love this post introducing Spring AI
• I love, as always, when vendors focus on their project or product in terms of how it can help the Spring community. Confluent, the fine folks behind Apache Kafka, are a great example of this
• A nice video on type-safe property paths in Spring Data