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…

On behalf of the team and everyone who has contributed, I’m happy to announce that Spring for Apache Pulsar 1.2.15 and 2.0.3 have been released and are now available from Maven Central.

The 1.2.15 release will be included in the upcoming Spring Boot 3.5.11 releases. The 2.0.3 release will be included in the upcoming Spring Boot 4.0.3 release.

Please see the release notes (1.2.15 and 2.0.3) for more details.

On behalf of the team and everyone who has contributed, I’m pleased to announce the availability of 2025.1.3 and 2025.0.9 service releases. These releases ship with dependency upgrades, fixes for regressions and selected improvements.

The upcoming Spring Boot releases will pick up the above releases by next week.

2025.1.3

• Spring Data Commons 4.0.3 - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data JPA 4.0.3 - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Neo4j 8.0.3 - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data for Apache Cassandra 5.0.3 - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data MongoDB 5.0.3 - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data KeyValue 4.0.3 - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data LDAP 4.0.3 - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data REST 5.0.3 - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Redis 4.0.3 - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Elasticsearch 6.0.3 - Javadoc - Documentation - …

On behalf of the team and everyone who has contributed, I’m delighted to announce the first milestone of the 2026.0.0 release train.

Support for Type-Safe Property Paths

We now support type-safe property paths and property references as initiative to reduce the need for stringly-typed programming when referring to properties within an entity.

Java variants:

PropertyPath.from("name", Person.class) // existing String-based API
PropertyPath.of(Person::getName) // type-safe property reference expression

PropertyPath.from("address.country", Person.class) // existing nested path API
PropertyPath.of…

On behalf of the team and everyone who has contributed, I am pleased to announce the releases of Spring Security 6.5.8, 7.0.3 and 7.1.0-M2.

Please see the Spring Security 6.5.8, 7.0.3 and 7.1.0-M2 release notes for more details.

Project Page | GitHub | Issues | Documentation

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!

On behalf of the team and everyone who has contributed, I am pleased to announce that Spring Framework 6.2.16 and 7.0.4 are available now.

Spring Framework 6.2.16 ships with 38 fixes and documentation improvements. This version will be shipped next week with Spring Boot 3.5.11. Spring Framework 7.0.4 ships with 69 fixes and documentation improvements. This version will be shipped next week with Spring Boot 4.0.3.

Project Page | GitHub | Issues | Documentation

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! It's February 10th, 2026, as I write this from lovely London, UK. I spoke at the local Java User Group here last night, had a wonderful time. Tomorrow, I'm going home. It's been fun, but it's time to conclude this roller coaster whirlwind tour of Toronto, Canada; Helsinki, Finland; Stockholm, Sweden; Istanbul, Turkey; and London, UK.

I've been busy, but as usual, the community's been busier! There's a ton to get into so let's dive right into it!

• I did a video on how to build production-worthy AI systems and services with Spring AI. In it we look at most of what you need to know from Spring AI and we look at how to make it production worthy with observability, scalability, and - very importantly - security. Yes, security! We look at the new experimental Spring AI Community project called MCP Security which we can use to, you guessed it, secure MCP endpoints (in this case, with OAuth).
• another very interesting effort from our pal Thomas Vitale. It's called Docling, and it's a tool to prepare documents for AI (using Spring AI, natch)
• why AI feel hard …