Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This time, I'm talking to you after an insane week behind me. Last week I flew from San Francisco to Stockholm, Sweden where I was the speaker for the JForum event, a monthly meetup. Spring drew the largest audience to JForum since before the pandemic! Then, it was off to beautiful Barcelona for the fantastic Spring I/O event, where I did a keynote with Dr Mark Pollack on Spring AI, then hosted a joint talk with Spring cofounders Rod Johnson and Juergen Hoeller. Then, I did a joint talk with GraalVM found and Oracle vice…

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLM) has propelled Generative AI and surfaced one of its key components to a broad audience: Embeddings.

Embeddings are a vector representation of data in a high-dimensional space capturing their semantic meaning. Vector representations allow for more efficient and effective search (Vector Search) of similar items. Vector search is typically used to build Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems and so there is demand for vector databases.

While new vector databases are on the rise, existing database engines are gradually incorporating vector search…

Hi, Spring and Spring I/O fans! In this installment we have the privilege of chatting with friend of the community and legend Sergi Almar about the amazing Spring IO 2025, where this episode was published, and a lot more.

In the past couple of years we have seen heavy investment throughout the Java ecosystem to reduce application startup times. The main focus gravitates around Ahead-of-Time optimizations. May it be condensing code into a GraalVM native executable, capturing already optimized bytecode with Coordinated Restore at Checkpoint (CRaC), Class Data Sharing (CDS) or its more recent successor AOT cache (part of project Leyden). While barriers to entry vary between the different approaches, all of them move performance optimizations away from runtime into an earlier phase, such as build time or a separate…

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! As I write this, I'm in sunny Stockholm, Sweden for the JForum #123 installment. This is, apparently, the first time the meetup is completely full up since before the pandemic, with more than 150 people in attendance! Tak, Stockholm!

Then, tomorrow, I'm off to beautiful Barcelona, Spain, for the amazing Spring I/O event. I'll be doing part of the keynote with Spring AI founder Dr. Mark Pollack; I'll be looking at Spring's rich integration with AOT and GraalVM with GraalVM founder Thomas Wuerthinger; and I'll be doing…

Your First Spring AI 1.0 Application

by Dr. Mark Pollack, Christian Tsolov, and Josh Long

Hi, Spring fans! Spring AI is live on the Spring Initializr and everywhere fine bytes might be had. Ask your doctor if AI is right for you! It's an amazing time to be a Java and Spring developer. There's never been a better time to be a Java and Spring developer, and this is doubly true in this unique AI moment. You see, 90% of what people talk about when they talk about AI engineering is just integration with models, most of which have HTTP APIs. And most of what these models take is just human-language Strings. This is integration code, and what place for these integrations to exist than hanging off the side of your Spring-based workloads? The same workloads who business logic drives your organizations and which guard data that feeds your…

Last month, we explored how to secure Spring AI MCP Servers[1] with the OAuth2 authorization framework. In the conclusion of that article, we mentioned we'd explore using standalone Authorization Servers for MCP Security and deviate from the then-current specification.

Since we published the article, the community has been very active in revising the original version of the specification. The new draft is simpler, and the major change does match what we had imagined for security. MCP Servers are still OAuth2 Resource Servers, meaning they authorize incoming requests using access tokens passed…

Hi, Spring fans! In this edition, we talk to Eclipse Collections founder Donald Raab

It's a few months since we had a blog about Spring gRPC that wasn't just a release announcement. This one marks the first release since the project was promoted from experimental to a full member of the Spring Portfolio. This doesn't change the way you consume the project, but it has some implications for support and symbolically for what the project now means to the portfolio.

The latest release is 0.8.0, and it has been available for a couple of weeks now in Maven Central. The main reason for that release was to bump the dependencies to their latest versions, bringing Spring gRPC up to version 4 of the protobuf-java libraries. The easiest way to get started is to download a project with "gRPC" checked on the Spring Initializr. There are separate "starters" for Spring Boot applications gRPC that want to be "servers" or "clients", or you can get both at once from the plain spring-grpc-spring-boot-starter…