Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another illustrious installment of This Week in Spring! It’s Thanksgiving week here in the United States. Thanksgiving is traditionally celebrated with friends and family every fourth Thursday of November, gathered around a table full of food and, usually, a giant stuffed turkey. When celebrated well, it’s a time to come together and revel in gratitude for life’s good fortunes. And so, in that spirit, my friends, I want to remind you — and I’m sure I can speak for the entire Spring team here, too! — that we are so grateful for you. The community is the most amazing…

JSON is the go-to format for LLM tool responses, but recent discussions around alternative formats like TOON (Token-Oriented Object Notation) claim potential benefits in token efficiency and performance. While the debate continues—with critical analyses pointing to context-dependent results—the question is: how to experiment with these formats in your own Spring AI applications?

This article demonstrates how to configure Spring AI to convert tool responses between JSON, TOON, XML, CSV, and YAML, enabling you to decide what works best for your specific use case.

Spring AI Tool Calling: A Quick…

In the light of the new major releases of the Spring Framework and Spring Boot, the next major release of the Spring Tools is also around the corner. The GA is scheduled for December 10th and RCs will start to show up from now onwards.

Support for what is new in Spring

Spring Tools 5 contains support for various new features of Spring Framework 7 and Spring Boot 4, ranging from extensive support for the new API versioning feature, support for functional bean definitions via the new bean registrar API, semi-automatic configuration for JSpecify annotation based null analysis and support for AOT…

On behalf of the communit I am happy to announce the availablity of Spring Modulith 2.0. The release is an important milestone incorporating all learnings we've made in Spring Modulith's first generation. We ship the following major features:

• Overhaul event publication lifecycle #796 (Neo4j #1337, MongoDB #1336, JDBC #1321, JPA #1375, #1389)
• Support for application-module-specific Flyway migrations #1067, #1440
• Allow serialized execution of event externalization #1370
• Support for Jackson 3 in event serialization #1364, #1369
• Support to verify application module structure on startup #1287
• Migrate nullness verification to jSpecify #1192
• Propagate named interface assignments of types to return and parameter types of methods declared #1264
• Extract module description from a module's package-info.java Javadoc #1430
• Remove deprecated @ApplicationEventListener annotation …

Hi, Spring fans! Happy Spring Boot 4.0 release day! Make sure to get the bits on the Spring Initializr (you know - start.spring.io)! This release is packed with new features, a lot of which comes from Spring Framework 7. To help break it down for us this week, we’re joined by none other than the legendary Spring Framework contributor Sébastien Deleuze!

On behalf of the team and everyone who has contributed, I'm extremely happy to announce that Spring Boot 4.0.0 has been released and is now available from Maven Central.

This release is the beginning of a new Spring Boot generation providing solid foundations for coming years. Building on top of Spring Framework 7, there are a number of exciting new features in this release, including:

• A complete modularization of the Spring Boot codebase providing smaller and more focused jars.
• Portfolio-wide improvements for null safety with JSpecify.
• First class support for Java 25 (whilst retaining Java 17 compatibility).
• Support for API Versioning and HTTP Service Clients for REST based applications.
…

On behalf of the team and everyone who has contributed, I'm happy to announce that Spring Boot 3.5.8 has been released and is now available from Maven Central.

This release includes 57 bug fixes, documentation improvements, and dependency upgrades. Thanks to all those who have contributed with issue reports and pull requests.

How can you help?

If you're interested in helping out, check out the "ideal for contribution" tag in the issue repository. If you have general questions, please ask on stackoverflow.com using the spring-boot tag.

Project Page | GitHub | Issues | Documentation | Stack…

On behalf of the team and everyone who has contributed, I'm happy to announce that Spring Boot 3.4.12 has been released and is now available from Maven Central.

This release includes 45 bug fixes, documentation improvements, and dependency upgrades. Thanks to all those who have contributed with issue reports and pull requests.

How can you help?

If you're interested in helping out, check out the "ideal for contribution" tag in the issue repository. If you have general questions, please ask on stackoverflow.com using the spring-boot tag.

Project Page | GitHub | Issues | Documentation | Stack…

On behalf of the team and everyone who has contributed, I am pleased to announce that Spring Framework 7.0.1 is available now.

Spring Framework 7.0.1 ships with 15 fixes and documentation improvements. This version will be shipped today with Spring Boot 4.0.0.

Project Page | GitHub | Issues | Documentation