Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! It's May 5th, 2026, and I'm in Mainz, Germany, for the legendary JAX conference! It's been infinitely far too long since I've been at this amazing show, and I'm oh-so happy to be back here! Tonight, after my two talks here, I'm off to London, UK, for the equally amazing Devoxx UK show! It's bound to be a ton of fun!

• In last week's installment of A Bootiful Podcast, I talked to Ronald Dehuysser about his group's new JobRunr-powered OpenClaw-like thing.
• Have you seen that we have a handy new Releases section on the blog? There, you can find quick and to-the-point information about all the new Spring project releases. There are incalculable many! Speaking of, here are some you might've missed from two weeks ago!
• Spring AI 1.0.6, 1.1.5, 2.0.0-M5 are available now
• Spring Shell 4.0.2 is out, including renewed support for compiling Spring Shell applications, powered by the Spring component model, into GraalVM native images!
• Spring Modulith 2.1 RC1, 2.0.6, and 1.4.11 released
• Spring Boot 4.1.0 RC1 available now
• Spring Boot 4.0.6 available now
• Spring Boot 3.5.14 available now
• Spring Authorization Server 1.5.7 available now
• Spring for Apache Pulsar 1.2.17 and 2.0.5 are available now
• Spring for Apache Kafka 4.1.0 RC1, 4.0.5, and 3.3.15 available now
• Spring AI Recipe: building a graph-based agentic workflow
• This is a nice look at database locks and ways to optimize them with HikariCP
• This third-party event sourcing library looks interesting, and seems to offer a nice integration with Spring Boot
• A nice discussion around the place of LLMs in a Java architecture
• A nice article looking at the power of the new @Retryable support in Spring Framework 7 and Spring Boot 4