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, Node.js, and Go. Where the benchmark showed Java lagging was in memory use, but of course even there the story could be much improved if the benchmarker had converted the application into a GraalVM native image.
• The result of having such high-performance code? 62% of enterprises now use Java to power AI apps. This isn't surprising. Java and Spring are where the enterprise builds its business logic, and it's the most fertile ground for new AI integrations.
• Spring Security 6.5.8, 7.0.3, and 7.1.0 M2 are available now.
• Spring Data 2025.1.3 and 2025.0.9 are released.
• Spring Data 2026.0.0.M1 released.
• In last week's installment of A Bootiful Podcast, I had the privilege of talking to Richard Fichtner, who helped create one of my all-time favorite Maven plugins!
• Spring Framework 6.2.16 and 7.0.4 are available now! The latest release, 7.0.4, includes some delightful optimizations and is well worth an upgrade!
• I love this blog: Spring Boot + Spring AI: Building Production-Ready Intelligent Applications in 2026.
• Speaking of Spring AI: there's a new book just released on Spring AI that I've yet to read or even see. Looks interesting, though...