Hi, Spring fans! In this installment, I talk to Jennifer Reif, developer advocate at Neo4J, about graph RAG, graph databases, GraphQL, Neo4J, Spring Data Neo4J, and more.

#neo4j #graphRag #AI #artificialintelligence

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 …

If you've worked with data access in Java and especially with Spring Data for a while, then you are familiar with various Query and Update programming models. You write data access code. You refactor a property name. You run your tests. They fail. Your query strings? Still pointing to the old property name because strings don't refactor.

Sort.by("firstName", "lastName");

where("address.country").is(…);

Query construction often involves referencing domain properties by strings, whether for predicates, sorting, or path navigation. This approach is simple and intentionally lightweight. It…

Hi Spring fans! In this installment I sit down with DevOps legend and industry analyst extraordinaire John Willis and talk about his new book Rebels of Reason: The Long Road from Aristotle to ChatGPT and AI's Heroes Who Kept the Faith, and talk about the nature of the ecosystem, AI, the role of the developer in this exciting new world, and so much more! #ai #springboot #developers #artificailintelligence

• get the book
• begin your AI journey with Spring AI

Spring Fruits Benchmark

Abstract

Benchmarks are tricky to do well, and the results are often hard to interpret. This analysis attempts to go beyond a simple headline number to explore how performance varies with data set size. The results show that while results might be disappointing for a given data set size, the performance characteristics can change as the size changes, leading to different conclusions about scalability and efficiency. The result is a deeper insight into how a framework handles increasing loads and the factors that influence performance.

For a data set size N, the cycle time (inverse throughput) is linear in N, so t = A + B*N, with A a baseline framework cost per HTTP request, and B the processing time per data item. We measure A and B for a simple endpoint that fetches and renders a complete data set in JSON. A is small (on the order of tens of microseconds). Probably for a "real" application (not just CRUD) the processing time B…

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another awesome (and oh-so-agentic) week in Spring! We've got a ton to look into, and I've got even more to prepare for next week's DevNexus event in Atlanta, GA, so let's dive right into it! (Be sure to say "hi" if you're going to be there, though!)

• You've heard of Agent Skills before, right? The new thing announced about a month ago by Anthropic as a way to conditionally add knowledge about your expectations for workflows, processes, conventions, etc.? Well, good news! In this video, DaShaun Carter, James Ward, and I look at the amazing support for building Agent Skills (.md) with Spring AI and--- you heard it here first! ---the new SkillsJars project!
• In this video, I look at some of my favorite features in the new Spring gRPC 1.0 release, going from .proto…

Hi, Spring fans! In this installment I talk to the amazing Glenn Renfro about Spring Batch, Spring Integration, Spring AI, and much more — plus why you should definitely register to attend the amazing Devnexus event in Atlanta, GA!

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another rip-roaring installment of This Week in Spring! It's Lunar New Year or Chinese New Year for billions of people around the world and to those who celebrate, Happy Chinese/Lunar New Year (新年快乐)! Or Happy Spring Festival (春节快乐)! (My favorite kind of festival!)

In honor of the auspicious day, I asked the AI to generate an image of the fire horse, and it did not disappoint!

Awesome!

You know what else is awesome? So much amazing content from the community this week, so let's dive right into it!

• Nice! An article on using Spring AI on Baeldung.
• This is awesome! A micro-optimization discovered in OpenJDK that, for some (admittedly uncommon) use cases, results in 400x performance improvements.
• Speaking of performance! Did you see this MCP server performance benchmark? Spring AI crushed it! Our performance and transactions-per-second numbers were the best among similar implementations in Python…

Hi, Spring fans! I've been waiting for this episode for so long! Today, we're finally joined by my friend Richard Fichtner, who so took pity on my plight waiting for music to be added to the GraalVM that his company, XDev Software, created the music-maven-plugin, the best Maven plugin, ever! This episode was recorded live at the amazing JFokus 2026 event!