Hi, Spring fans, and welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! It's the 13th of January, 2026, and it's been quite the week indeed! Let's dive right into it!

• Nobody, and I mean nobody, asked. So I put together a video on how to use Spring WS to build SOAP-based services in 2026. Hey, SOAP may be legacy but the legacy endures in a lot of places and there's no reason you can't modernize those systems and services to use Spring Boot 4, GraalVM, and OAuth, as I show in this video.
• In last week's installment of A Bootiful Podcast, I talked to Spring Security lead Rob Winch on Spring Security 7
• Spring gRPC 1.0.1 is available now
• I love this blog from Embabel creator Rod Johnson: RAG pipelines are the past, agentic is the future
• I know this doesn't have anything to do with Spring, per se, but I find it very useful: What's New in Maven 4
• I'm so pleased my article on Spring AI is in the top five must-read articles on InfoQ for 2025: thank you!
• Speaking of, here's the article itself: Spring AI delivers easy AI Systems and Services
• InfoQ also have a really good article on what's new and novel in Spring Boot 4 and Spring Framework 7
• I don't know if this is AI slop. But it's interesting: FastAPI vs Spring Boot: I tested both for six months
• the Istio Spring Boot integration has been released
• Cool! The Kotlin AI examples notebooks use Spring AI, too!