There was a flurry of activity in the Spring ecosystem during the week of February 16th, 2026, highlighting the second milestone releases of: Spring Boot, Spring Security, Spring Integration, Spring Modulith and Spring AMQP; along with the first milestone releases of Spring Session, Spring for Apache Kafka and Spring LDAP.
Spring Boot
The second milestone release of Spring Boot 4.1.0 delivers bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: the ability to specify a character encoding value on the spring.config.import property upon importing configuration files; and the addition of attributes, uptime, startTime, currentTime, timezone, locale and workingDirectory to the ProcessInfo class to enhance the information provided by the /actuator/info endpoint. More details on this release may be found in the release notes and this wiki page.
Spring Data
The first milestone release of Spring Data 2026.0.0 ships with: upgrades to Kotlin 2.3.10 and Vavr 0.11.0; and support for type-safe parameters in the PropertyPath and PropertyReference interfaces that eliminates the need for using strings when referring to properties within an entity. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring Security
The second milestone release of Spring Security 7.1.0 provides bug fixes, dependency upgrades and new features such as: null safety with JSpecify; and the ability to configure an instance of the AuthenticationDetailsSource interface from within the AnonymousConfigurer class to align with the same functionality from within the HttpBasicConfigurer class. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring Session
The first milestone release of Spring Session 4.1.0 delivers dependency upgrades and two new features: support for null safety with JSpecify; and use of Java Toolchains when compiling with JDK 25 to ensure compatibility with JDK 17 and optimal support from JSpecify. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring Integration
The second milestone release of Spring Integration 7.1.0 ships with bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: new classes, FromCloudEventTransformer and CloudEvents, to support the CloudEvents specification; and a replacement of the getPropertyValue(Object,String,Class method, defined in the TestUtils class, with a more generic getPropertyValue(Object, String) that infers the type parameter for improved adoption in tests. More details on this release may be found in the release notes and this what’s new page.
Spring Modulith
The second milestone release of Spring Modulith 2.1.0 provides bug fixes, dependency upgrades and new features such as: events from the PublishedEvents interface and Scenario class will now be seen from all threads by default; and a restructuring of observability metrics for more consistent naming and the ability to customize publications. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring AMQP
The second milestone release of Spring AMQP 4.1.0 delivers dependency upgrades and new features such as: support for the AMQP 1.0 specification with a new AmqpMessageListenerContainer class to serve as an implementation of the MessageListenerContainer interface; and a new AmqpListenerEndpoint interface that connects an instance of the MessageListener interface with an instance of the AmqpMessageListenerContainer class at runtime. More details on this release may be found in the release notes and this what’s new page.
Spring for Apache Kafka
The first milestone release of Spring for Apache Kafka 4.1.0 ships with bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and one new feature that adds a new ackMode attribute to the @KafkaListener annotation for configuration of a per-listener acknowledgment. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring LDAP
The first milestone release of Spring LDAP 4.1.0 provides dependency upgrades and two new features: the ability for the executeWithContext() method, defined in the ContextExecutor interface, to return null with JSpecify; and a move of the DnParser interface and DnParserImpl class (both deprecated since version 2.0 in favor of using the Java LdapName class) to the springframework/ldap/core namespace for consistency. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
