Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! As I write this I am preparing for a flight to North Carolina (first in flight!). This week's going to be busy, but next week even busier still! I'll be at AI By The Bay (in San Francisco), AI Native Dev Con (in NYC), and QCon SF (in SF). All in five days! It's going to be a ton of fun but I can't wait.

Why am I so busy? Because Spring's kind of a big thing and it should be and I want to share it. Which brings us to this week's roundup. So, without further ado, let's dive right into it!

• Good news everybody! Spring AI 1.1.0 RC1 is available now!
• yet another amazing post from Spring AI legend Christian Tsolov, this one on using Spring AI and an LLM as a judge
• Spring Boot 4.0.0 RC2 is now available
• Spring Tools 4.32.2 is available now
• in last week's installment of A Bootiful Podcast, I talked to the amazing Vaadin team
• this is so cool! I love it when this sort of stuff happens. thanks to the power of a good framework, optimizations in one place can result in huge improvements across the board!
• Hey, we just released the next set of GAs for Micrometer and Micrometer Tracing! This means that the Boot 4.0 generation's release train has just started. Micrometer 1.16.0 and Micrometer Tracing 1.6.0
• Spring Batch 6.0.0-RC2 available now!
• Spring gRPC Next Steps for 1.0.0
• Spring for GraphQL 2.0.0-RC2 released
• interesting project from Spring community legend Simon Martinelli on an alternative to Spring Data's Page: a Slice
• Did you read the latest installment of Jetbrains' Java Annotated Monthly? I wrote up a piece for it
• Have you yet watched Thomas Vitale's awesome post on modular RAG with Spring AI?
• Good news everybody! The Java SDK for MCP is now at 0.15.0