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 …

hi, Spring fans! In this installment I have the privilege of talking to JetBrains legend Marco Behler

Hi, Spring fans! This week I'm in northern Europe. I went on the Vaadin cruise from Finland to Sweden, gave a talk on a boat, then arrived in Stockholm in time for the amazing JFokus 2026 event where I had the privilege yesterday of doing a deep dive with my pal James Ward on Spring AI and agentic patterns (some of which we also look at in this very roundup). Later today, I'm doing a talk introducing the new Spring Boot 4 support. Busy day, so let's dive right into this roundup!

• Spring gRPC 1.0.2 available now
• want your AI agents to be more intelligent? Check out this amazing new blog from the Spring AI team introducing Agent2Agent (A2A) support
• In last week's episode of A Bootiful Podcast, I talked to Java developer advocate Billy Korando
• Spring Cloud 2025.1.1 has been released
• and yet another blog form the Spring AI team, this one announcing agent skills support
• ... and this one introduces the subagent orchestration pattern with Spring AI
• Spring Shell 4.0.1 is out
• did you see InfoQ's Spring roundup?
• Makin-san has a nice blog post on instrumenting a DataSource…

On behalf of the team and all contributors, I am pleased to announce that Spring Shell 4.0.1 is now available from Maven Central!

What's New in Spring Shell 4.0.1

Spring Shell 4.0.1 is a patch release that addresses several issues reported by the community since the release of Spring Shell 4.0.0. This release includes important bug fixes and improvements to enhance the overall stability and performance of the framework.

You can find the complete list of changes in the 4.0.1 release notes.

Feedback

Many thanks to all contributors who made this release possible! We encourage you to try Spring Shell 4.0.1 out and provide your feedback on GitHub Issues and GitHub Discussions…

On behalf of the team and everyone who has contributed, I'm happy to announce that Spring gRPC 1.0.2 maintenance release is available from Maven Central.

Please see the release notes for more details.

We want to take this opportunity to again thank all our users and contributors.

Project Page | GitHub

Hi, Spring (and Java) fans! In this episode I am beyond delighted to talk Java developer advocate and longtime friend of the show Billy Korando about the latest-and-greatest in the Java ecosystem.

The Agent2Agent (A2A) Protocol is an open standard for seamless AI agent communication. It enables agents to discover capabilities, exchange messages, and coordinate workflows across platforms—regardless of their implementation.

Spring AI A2A integrates the A2A Java SDK with Spring AI through Spring Boot autoconfiguration. It seamlessly connects the A2A protocol with Spring AI's ChatClient and tools, enabling you to expose your agents as A2A servers.

This post is part of the Spring AI Agentic Patterns series. While previous posts covered making individual agents more capable (Agent Skills, AskUserQuestionTool, TodoWriteTool, Sub-agent orchestration), this post shows how the A2A Protocol enables agents to…

On behalf of the community, I am pleased to announce that the General Availability (RELEASE) of the Spring Cloud 2025.1.1 Release Train is available today. The release can be found in Maven Central. You can check out the 2025.1.1 release notes for more information.

Notable Changes in the 2025.1.1 Release Train

Spring Cloud 2025.0.0 is incompatible with Spring Boot 4.0.1 and later 4.0.x releases due to changes in Spring Boot. This Spring Cloud release introduces compatibility with Spring Boot 4.0.1 and later 4.0.x release for the 2025.1.x Spring Cloud release train.

Spring Cloud Kubernetes

• New leader election implementations for the Kubernetes Java Client (#2107) and Fabric8 Client (#2108)
…

In this blog, we show how using Spring AI, we can integrate with Anthropic's Native Skills API for Cloud-Based Document Generation and Custom Skills.

Spring AI adds support for Anthropic's Agent Skills — modular capabilities that let Claude generate actual files rather than text descriptions. With Skills enabled, Claude produces real Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, and PDFs that you can download and use directly.

This post covers how Spring AI integrates with Skills, including both pre-built Skills and Custom Skills for organization-specific document generation.

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