There is no doubt that AI-based coding assistants are already or will be widely used by developers and within organizations. While the overall outlook is pretty certain, the exact way when and how to use those tools might vary, ranging from extensions for existing IDEs (e.g. Copilot for Visual Studio Code) to entirely AI-focused environments (e.g. Cursor) or pure command-line interfaces (e.g. Claude Code).

The upcoming new major version 5 of the Spring Tools is ready for this new era in two different dimensions:

• we make sure that you can install and use the Spring Tools in as many AI-extended or AI-focused environments as possible, enhancing your AI-powered developer experience with the traditional Spring support that the Spring Tools bring to the table (ranging from specific validations, quick fixes, quick navigation and understanding, and more).
• we integrate the Spring Tools with the surrounding AI-powered environment to improve the AI coding experience itself.
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Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring. By mistake, I inadvertently published older content in this installment, then tried to fix it and ended up re-publishing the same content. And, what's worse, I somehow ended up deleting the draft I had written for this installment — the one I intended to copy in to override the bad content. Ugh. A comedy of errors. Anyway, this is a lesson in why you should make sure you get enough sleep. And this is why I am now re-writing the same content again!

So, without any further ado, here finally is this week's roundup!

• this is an exciting look at the next generation of the Spring Tools projects
• in last week's installment of A Bootiful Podcast, I talked to Spring and Java community legend Simon Martinelli
• Spring Cloud 2025.1.0 has been released
• even more awesome stuff on the Spring Data AOT repository support
• I love this article from Spring Modulith founder Oliver Drotbohm on rethinking Spring Application Integration Testing
• How cool is this? Spring AI is at AWS re:Invent!
• want to learn more about the amazing new stuff in Spring Framework 7 and Spring Boot 4?…

When working on Spring projects, developers do not only think in terms of low-level concepts like classes and interfaces. When using Spring, you think about higher-level abstractions and concepts like services, repositories, configuration classes, entities, aggregate roots, and so on. To bring these concepts front and center for developers in their coding environments, the Spring Tools analyzes your source code from a Spring perspective and provides overviews and quick navigation based on those concepts - and we have done that for a long time already.

In the past, we did this using the “Go To Symbol” functionality. The Spring Tools created specialized symbols for those Spring concepts by analyzing the source code and extracting the necessary information. That resulted, for example, in symbols being created for request mappings that all looked like /greeting – GET…

Hi, Spring fans! Happy Thanksgiving from me, and I am sure the entire Spring team, to you! We are, it should be clear, oh so very grateful.. thankful.. for you, the community. This week it is my great pleasure to chat with Spring community legend Simon Martinelli.

Concluding the Road to GA blog post series, let's explore benefits of Spring Data AOT Repositories.

Back in May 2025, we first introduced Ahead of Time (AOT) repositories as a preview feature for JPA and MongoDB with the 3rd Milestone of the next Spring Data generation. This feature, in short, uses AOT processing to implement your repository query methods using actual source code by relying on the store-specific nature of the repository.

Since then, we've incorporated feedback, ironed out rough edges, and onboarded two more modules: Apache Cassandra and JDBC. This means, with the 2025.1.0 release, you are be able to use AOT generated repositories with four Spring Data…

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another illustrious installment of This Week in Spring! It’s Thanksgiving week here in the United States. Thanksgiving is traditionally celebrated with friends and family every fourth Thursday of November, gathered around a table full of food and, usually, a giant stuffed turkey. When celebrated well, it’s a time to come together and revel in gratitude for life’s good fortunes. And so, in that spirit, my friends, I want to remind you — and I’m sure I can speak for the entire Spring team here, too! — that we are so grateful for you. The community is the most amazing…

JSON is the go-to format for LLM tool responses, but recent discussions around alternative formats like TOON (Token-Oriented Object Notation) claim potential benefits in token efficiency and performance. While the debate continues—with critical analyses pointing to context-dependent results—the question is: how to experiment with these formats in your own Spring AI applications?

This article demonstrates how to configure Spring AI to convert tool responses between JSON, TOON, XML, CSV, and YAML, enabling you to decide what works best for your specific use case.

Spring AI Tool Calling: A Quick…

In the light of the new major releases of the Spring Framework and Spring Boot, the next major release of the Spring Tools is also around the corner. The GA is scheduled for December 10th and RCs will start to show up from now onwards.

Support for what is new in Spring

Spring Tools 5 contains support for various new features of Spring Framework 7 and Spring Boot 4, ranging from extensive support for the new API versioning feature, support for functional bean definitions via the new bean registrar API, semi-automatic configuration for JSpecify annotation based null analysis and support for AOT…

Hi, Spring fans! Happy Spring Boot 4.0 release day! Make sure to get the bits on the Spring Initializr (you know - start.spring.io)! This release is packed with new features, a lot of which comes from Spring Framework 7. To help break it down for us this week, we’re joined by none other than the legendary Spring Framework contributor Sébastien Deleuze!