The challenge of evaluating Large Language Model (LLM) outputs is critical for notoriously non-deterministic AI applications, especially as they move into production.

Traditional metrics like ROUGE and BLEU fall short when assessing the nuanced, contextual responses that modern LLMs produce. Human evaluation, while accurate, is expensive, slow, and doesn't scale.

Enter LLM-as-a-Judge - a powerful technique that uses LLMs themselves to evaluate the quality of AI-generated content. Research shows that sophisticated judge models can align with human judgment up to 85%, which is actually higher…

On behalf of the team and everyone who has contributed, I am pleased to announce the 4.32.2 release of the Spring Tools for Eclipse.

This is a maintenance release that addresses an issue with the Eclipse based distribution not showing multiline selection highlights anymore when users have upgraded to macOS 26.1. Upgrading to Spring Tools 4.32.2 fixes this issue for the Eclipse based distributions of the Spring Tools. Special thanks go to Sebastian Ratz from SAP for sharing the workaround code snippet with us.

For users who have installed the Spring Tools as an add-on into their existing…

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 …

On behalf of the Spring AI engineering team and everyone who has contributed, we are happy to announce that Spring AI 1.1.0-RC1 has been released and is now available from Maven Central.

This patch release delivers important stability improvements and bug fixes.

Release Summary

This release includes 40 improvements, bug fixes, and documentation updates. The focus of this patch release is on:

• Improvements: 12 enhancements to expand capabilities and functionality
• Stability: 10 bug fixes addressing community-reported issues
• Documentation: 12 improvements to help developers
• Security: 6 dependency upgrades for enhanced security
…

Hi, Spring fans! In this installment, I had the privilege to sit down with Vaadin legends Joonas Lehtinen, Marcus Hellberg, and Leif Åstrand at the amazing Vaadin Create 2025 event in Frankfurt, Germany.

I am pleased to announce that Spring Batch 6.0.0-RC2 is now available from Maven Central!

What's new in Spring Batch 6.0.0-RC2?

This second release candidate introduces a long-awaited feature which is the use of contextual lambda expressions to configure batch artefacts. This new style of configuration provides a more concise and readable way to define item readers and writers.

For example, instead of using the traditional builder pattern like in the following snippet to define a delimited file reader:

var reader = new FlatFileItemReaderBuilder()
    .resource(...)
    .delimited…

On behalf of the team and everyone who has contributed, I'm happy to announce that Spring Boot 4.0.0-RC2 has been released and is now available from Maven Central.

This release includes 63 enhancements, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades, and bug fixes. Notable new features include:

• Modularization of spring-boot-micrometer-tracing
• Restoration of Jersey Support
• A few bug fixes and last minute updates before GA

Please see the release notes for more details and upgrade instructions.

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…

This is a new blog post in the Road to GA series, this time updating everyone on the plans to integrate Spring gRPC with Spring Boot 4. The original plan was to move the autoconfiguration from Spring gRPC into Spring Boot in time for the 4.0 release. Unfortunately we haven't been able to find the time to merge that change, but the good news is that we have instead added support for Spring Boot 4 to the existing Spring gRPC project, and are planning a 1.0 release in the coming days. This arrangement will continue until the merge can finally happen, most likely in an early milestone of Spring…

I am pleased to announce that the second Spring for GraphQL 2.0 Release Candidate is now available.

This release brings back the GraphQL Java 25.x baseline as it will be released in November before our GA date. This also ships a new feature, the support for @EntityMapping with interface types.

What's next?

We have compiled all release notes on our wiki. Our next step is the final release next month!

2.0.0-RC2 is now available from https://repo.spring.io and Maven Central.

How can you help?

If you have general questions, please ask on stackoverflow.com using the spring-graphql tag.

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