Happy holidays, everyone! The year may be winding down, but the Spring ecosystem continues unabated. We’re now a few weeks past the generational Spring Boot 4.0 release in November, and there have been tons of releases (and patches) since then. There’s also equal excitement reflected in posts from the community, so we’ve got a lot to dig into this week. So, without further ado…

• In last week’s installment of A Bootiful Podcast, I talked to the legendary Spring cofounder Juergen Hoeller
  https://spring.io/blog/2025/12/18/a-bootiful-podcast-juergen-hoeller
• Next-level Kotlin support in Spring Boot 4
  https://spring.io/blog/2025/12/18/next-level-kotlin-support-in-spring-boot-4
• Spring Shell 4.0.0-RC1 available now
  https://spring.io/blog/2025/12/19/spring-shell-4-0-0-rc1-released
• Spring Modulith 2.0.1, 1.4.6, and 1.3.12 released
  https://spring.io/blog/2025/12/20/spring-modulith-2-0-1-1-4-6-and-1-3-12-released
• Spring Tools 5 released
  https://spring.io/blog/2025/12/22/spring-tools-5-0-1-released
• Explainable AI agents: capture LLM tool-call reasoning with Spring AI
  https://spring.io/blog/2025/12/23/spring-ai-tool-argument-augmenter-tzolov/
• Spring Boot 3.4.13 available now
  https://spring.io/blog/2025/12/18/spring-boot-3-4-13-available-now
• Spring Boot 4.0.1 available now
  https://spring.io/blog/2025/12/18/spring-boot-4-0-1-available-now
• Spring Boot 3.5.9 available now
  https://spring.io/blog/2025/12/18/spring-boot-3-5-9-available-now
• Spring Batch 6.0.1 available now
  https://spring.io/blog/2025/12/17/spring-batch-6-0-1-available-now
• Spring Authorization Server 2025.12 released
  https://spring.io/blog/2025/12/16/spring-authorization-server-releases
• Spring Cloud 2025.0.1 (aka Northfields) has been released
  https://spring.io/blog/2025/12/17/spring-cloud-2025-0-1-aka-northfields-has-been-released
• Spring Boot 4: the 7 breaking changes every developer must know
  https://medium.com/@pmLearners/spring-boot-4-the-7-breaking-changes-every-developer-must-know-99de4c2b60e2
• This is interesting: event-driven microservices with Orkes Conductor
  https://www.baeldung.com/orkes-conductor-guide
• Spring date values with Spring Data Cassandra
  https://www.baeldung.com/spring-data-cassandra-dates
• I love this session on optimizing JVM performance with Leyden and Spring Boot
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izLzgnMMjbU
• Want to build quickly? You’re going to need a platform!
  https://blogs.vmware.com/tanzu/tanzu-platform-still-the-best-place-for-enterprise-java-apps/
• The Spring Boot governance starter
  https://youtube.com/shorts/Gi3L9lVKUzw?si=lCEru6DD8q5wx60V
• I love this post on API versioning with Spring
  https://www.baeldung.com/spring-api-versioning
• Yet another nice post from Piotr, this time on gRPC in Spring Boot using the new Spring gRPC support
  https://piotrminkowski.com/2025/12/15/grpc-spring/
• MCP elicitations with Java and Spring AI
  https://builder.aws.com/content/36lU1MoMHb7tgVSbS3WTX5t6s31/mcp-elicitations-with-java-and-spring-ai
• This is a Spring Boot starter maintained by the community that makes using SSE even easier
  https://github.com/kusoroadeolu/streamline-spring-boot-starter