There was a flurry of activity in the Spring ecosystem during the week of January 19th, 2026, highlighting the first milestone releases of: Spring Boot; Spring Security; Spring Integration; Spring Modulith; and Spring AMQP; along with the second milestone release of Spring AI.
Spring Boot
The first milestone release of Spring Boot 4.1.0 delivers bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: a new @AutoConfigureWebServer annotation to start a webserver in support of the @SpringBootTest annotation with specific classes and a random port; and improved observability and metrics support with automatic configuration of configuration beans defined in Spring AMQP and Spring Kafka. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Along with bug fixes, documentation improvements and dependency upgrades, Spring Boot 4.0.2, the second maintenance release, provides a noteworthy change by which the dependency on org.eclipse.jetty.ee11:jetty-ee11-servlets module has been removed from spring-boot-jetty module as it was unused and determined to be unnecessary. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring Security
The first milestone release of Spring Security 7.1.0 ships with bug fixes, dependency upgrades and new features such as: a nullability contract added to the encode() method defined in the PasswordEncoder interface; and use of the getSharedInstance() method, defined in the Spring Framework DefaultParameterNameDiscoverer class, instead of creating separate custom instances of that class. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring Integration
The first milestone release of Spring Integration 7.1.0 delivers bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: new spring-integration-cloudevents and spring-integration-grpc modules to support CloudEvents transformations and the gRPC Protocol, respectively; and new GrpcInboundGateway and GrpcOutboundGateway classes to serve as inbound and outbound gateways for gRPC client invocations. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes and this what’s new page.
Spring Modulith
The first milestone release of Spring Modulith 2.1.0 provides bug fixes, dependency upgrades and improvements such as: the ability to reset the shift within an instance of the TimeMachine class after an integration test run; and two new property values, execute-all and execute-none, as options for the spring.modulith.test.on-no-changes property that provided the ability to skip all tests if no changes are detected. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring AI
The second milestone release of Spring AI 2.0.0 ships with bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and many new features such as: new interfaces, McpSyncServerCustomizer and McpAsyncServerCustomizer, added to the McpServerAutoConfiguration class that resolves issues with MCP autoconfiguration for contexts in non-web application environments; and the addition of vector store backends from Amazon S3, Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Base and Infinispan. Further details on this release, including breaking changes, may be found in the release notes.
Spring Batch
Spring Batch 6.0.2, the second maintenance release, delivers bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and one new feature that introduces two new classes, ZonedDateTimeToStringConverter and OffsetDateTimeToStringConverter, to support types of the JobParameters class. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring AMQP
The first milestone release of Spring AMQP 4.1.0 provides bug fixes, dependency upgrades and new features such as: a new AmqpMessageListenerContainer class that implements a container similar to the RabbitAmqpListenerContainer class; and a new @EnableAmqp annotation to import an instance of the AmqpDefaultConfiguration class with convenient infrastructure beans. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes and this what’s new page.
