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 for observability
• I know I've mentioned this before, but this is a Spring Boot-powered mind-mapping software and I like it