Hi, Spring fans! In this installment, I sit down with the legendary Bruce Eckel, who has probably forgotten more about programming languages than I will ever know, and whose book Thinking in Java helped launch me into a career.

On behalf of the community, I am pleased to announce that the Release Candidate 1 (RC1) of the Spring Cloud 2025.1.0 Release Train is available today. The release can be found in Spring Milestone repository. You can check out the 2025.1.0 release notes for more information.

Notable Changes in the 2025.1.0 Release Train

Highlights of this release are support for Spring Boot 4.0.0-RC2, updates for Jackson 3 support, initial support for JSpecify Null-Safety, dependency updates and bug fixes.

A complete list of changes for this release can found in the 2025.1.0-RC1 GitHub Project.

Spring Cloud…

On behalf of the team and everyone who has contributed, I am pleased to announce that Spring Framework 6.2.13 is available now.

Spring Framework 6.2.13 ships with 42 fixes and documentation improvements. This version will be shipped next week with Spring Boot 3.4.12 and 3.5.8.

Project Page | GitHub | Issues | Documentation

Dear Spring community,

On behalf of the team and everyone who has contributed, I am pleased to announce that Spring Framework 7.0 is generally available now! Spring Framework 7.0 is the beginning of a new framework generation with a focus on Java 25 and the latest open source ecosystem, serving as the foundation for Spring Boot 4.0.

This generation of Spring comes with a pragmatic baseline and dependency upgrade:

• Embracing Java 25 (as the latest LTS) while retaining a Java 17 baseline
• Jakarta EE 11 API level: Servlet 6.1, JPA 3.2, Bean Validation 3.1
• Comprehensive null safety through JSpecify
• Support for Jackson 3.0 (retaining deprecated support for Jackson 2.x)
• Kotlin 2.2
• JUnit 6.0
…

This is a new blog post in the Road to GA series, this time sharing an update on the status of the null-safety support across the Spring portfolio, as a follow-up of my previous related blog post Null Safety in Spring applications with JSpecify and NullAway and related Spring I/O talk.

Are we fixing “the billion dollar mistake”?

Yes, we are! And by “we”, I mean the organizations involved in the JSpecify projects, the Spring team, and you, Spring developers who are going to upgrade to Spring Boot 4.

That said, I don’t think “the billion dollar mistake” was the invention of the null reference that Tony Hoare apologized for. I think the real mistake was to not express it explicitly in the type system, as this is the implicit nature of the nullability that causes so many NullPointerException…

On behalf of the Spring AI team, I'm pleased to announce the general availability of Spring AI 1.1.0!

Spring AI 1.1 brings Model Context Protocol integration, advanced AI capabilities, and expanded model provider support to the Spring ecosystem. The 1.1 development cycle includes over 850 improvements, bug fixes, and documentation updates.

We extend our sincere thanks to the community contributors, partner organizations, and the broader Spring AI ecosystem for their invaluable contributions throughout this release cycle.

Release Summary

Spring AI 1.1.0 includes substantial improvements across…

The challenge of evaluating Large Language Model (LLM) outputs is critical for notoriously non-deterministic AI applications, especially as they move into production.

Traditional metrics like ROUGE and BLEU fall short when assessing the nuanced, contextual responses that modern LLMs produce. Human evaluation, while accurate, is expensive, slow, and doesn't scale.

Enter LLM-as-a-Judge - a powerful technique that uses LLMs themselves to evaluate the quality of AI-generated content. Research shows that sophisticated judge models can align with human judgment up to 85%, which is actually higher…

On behalf of the team and everyone who has contributed, I am pleased to announce the 4.32.2 release of the Spring Tools for Eclipse.

This is a maintenance release that addresses an issue with the Eclipse based distribution not showing multiline selection highlights anymore when users have upgraded to macOS 26.1. Upgrading to Spring Tools 4.32.2 fixes this issue for the Eclipse based distributions of the Spring Tools. Special thanks go to Sebastian Ratz from SAP for sharing the workaround code snippet with us.

For users who have installed the Spring Tools as an add-on into their existing…

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! As I write this I am preparing for a flight to North Carolina (first in flight!). This week's going to be busy, but next week even busier still! I'll be at AI By The Bay (in San Francisco), AI Native Dev Con (in NYC), and QCon SF (in SF). All in five days! It's going to be a ton of fun but I can't wait.

Why am I so busy? Because Spring's kind of a big thing and it should be and I want to share it. Which brings us to this week's roundup. So, without further ado, let's dive right into it!

• Good news everybody! Spring AI 1.1.0 RC1 is available now!
• yet another amazing post from Spring AI legend Christian Tsolov, this one on using Spring AI and an LLM as a judge
• Spring Boot 4.0.0 RC2 is now available
• Spring Tools 4.32.2 is available now
• in last week's installment of A Bootiful Podcast, I talked to the amazing Vaadin team
• this is so cool! I love it when this sort of stuff happens. thanks to the power of a good framework, optimizations in one place can result in huge improvements across the board!
• Hey, we just released the next set of GAs for Micrometer and Micrometer Tracing! This means that the Boot 4.0 generation's release train has just started. Micrometer 1.16.0 and …