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 for Java developers, and why it doesn't have to
• in last week's installment of A Bootiful Podcast, I had the privilege of sitting down to talk with JetBrains' Marco Behler
• a nice video on prompt caching with Spring AI
• I like (but also hate LOL) this post comparing raw AI model client library usage to Spring AI. I like it because it does a great job making clear the start difference in verbosity and boilerplate, but I hate it because it's sad to think this was even a question that needed answering! Use Spring AI. It'll get you to production faster in every way.
• a nice post on Piotr's techblog on using Spring AI with external MCP servers
• I've been talking to people a lot in recent weeks about - believe it or not - Spring Batch! And imagine thus my deluight in finding this series on Spring Batch (in Korean)
• the Spring Batch plugin for Jetbrains IntelliJ has been updated
• nice! there's a new Udemy course on Spring AI