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.

On behalf of the community, I am pleased to announce that the General Availability (RELEASE) of the Spring Cloud 2025.1.0 Release Train is available today. The release can be found in Maven Central. You can check out the 2025.1.0 release notes for more information.

Notable Changes in the 2025.1.0 Release Train

This is a major release, each project has been updated to version 5.0.0. This release is based on Spring Framework 7 and Spring Boot 4.

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

Spring Cloud Release

• The spring-cloud-stater-parent artifact has been removed (#437)
…

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…

On behalf of the communit I am happy to announce the availablity of Spring Modulith 2.0. The release is an important milestone incorporating all learnings we've made in Spring Modulith's first generation. We ship the following major features:

• Overhaul event publication lifecycle #796 (Neo4j #1337, MongoDB #1336, JDBC #1321, JPA #1375, #1389)
• Support for application-module-specific Flyway migrations #1067, #1440
• Allow serialized execution of event externalization #1370
• Support for Jackson 3 in event serialization #1364, #1369
• Support to verify application module structure on startup #1287
• Migrate nullness verification to jSpecify #1192
• Propagate named interface assignments of types to return and parameter types of methods declared #1264
• Extract module description from a module's package-info.java Javadoc #1430
• Remove deprecated @ApplicationEventListener annotation …

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!