There was a flurry of activity during the week of September 21st, 2026, highlighting: second milestone releases of: Spring Boot, Spring Batch, Spring Security, Spring AMQP, Spring Integration, Spring Data, Spring Framework, Spring for GraphQL and Spring for Apache Kafka. There were also first milestone releases of Spring AI, Spring Cloud, Spring Web Services and Spring LDAP.
Spring Boot
The second milestone release of Spring Boot 4.2.0 delivers bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: the ability to auto-configure a named SSL Bundle with an instance of the Spring LDAP LdapContextSource class; and a new configuration property, management.observations.conventions=[micrometer|opentelemetry], to switch semantic conventions to/from Micrometer and OpenTelemetry. More details on this release may be found in the release notes and this wiki page.
Spring Framework
The second milestone release of Spring Framework 7.1.0 ships with bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: improved null safety in the ScheduledAnnotationBeanPostProcessor class; and improved validation with the parse() method, defined in the MockCookie class, if the Set-Cookie HTTP response header is empty. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring Data
The second milestone release of Spring Data 2026.1.0 provides notable changes such as: initial compatibility with Hibernate ORM 8.0.0.Beta1 to support the upcoming Jakarta Persistence 4.0 specification, while still maintaining the baseline for Jakarta Persistence 3.2; and a refactor of support for the Redis JSON API with a new JsonOperations interface that defines numerous subinterfaces for JSON operations along with the ability for the GenericJackson2JsonRedisSerializer and GenericJacksonJsonRedisSerializer classes to implement the RedisJsonSerializer interface with raw-value slicing.
Spring Cloud
The first milestone release of Spring Cloud 2026.0.0, codenamed Paddington, delivers notable changes such as: an new PropertyPathNotifier interface that allows for applications to be notified through HTTP when a configuration change has been detected; and a refactor of the ForwardedHeadersFilter and XForwardedHeadersFilter classes to deny requests from an untrusted proxy. This release is based on Spring Boot 4.2.0-M2.
Spring Security
The second milestone release of Spring Security 7.2.0 ships with bug fixes, dependency upgrades and new features such as: the ability to annotate the PermissionEvaluator interface with @EnableMethodSecurity; and a simplified null provider check on the ProviderManager class. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring for GraphQL
The first milestone release of Spring for GraphQL 2.1.0 provides dependency upgrades and new features such as: the ability to reject unsupported HTTP methods at configuration time; and new builders added to the GraphQlHttpHandler and GraphQlSseHandler classes to support HTTP GET requests. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring Integration
The second milestone release of Spring Integration 7.2.0 delivers bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: a new KafkaShareMessageDrivenChannelAdapter class that serves as an a message-driven inbound channel adapter to select between two listeners; and a migration from the Spring Framework Function<K,V> to CheckedFunction<T, R,E> in the Mail Java DSL. More details on this release may be found in the release notes and what's new page.
Spring AI
The first milestone release of Spring AI 2.1.0 ships with dependency upgrades and new features such as: a new MessagePart interface, and corresponding implementations, for handling various parts of a message to accurately represent the messages that the current models actually return; and a new OpenAiResponsesChatModel class that communicates with the OpenAI /v1/responses endpoint and the existing OpenAiChatModel class. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring Batch
The second milestone release of Spring Batch 6.1.0 provides bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: a new BatchConstants class to define various Spring Batch constants; and the ability to accept a resource pattern in the MultiResourceItemReaderBuilder class to more conveniently specify resource locations. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring AMQP
The second milestone release of Spring AMQP 4.2.0 delivers bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: improved null validation in the AbstractRoutingConnectionFactory and AbstractRoutingAmqpConnectionFactory classes; and the ability to register custom implementations of the RetryListener interface. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring for Apache Kafka
The second milestone release of Spring for Apache Kafka 4.2.0 ships with bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: support for applying nullability annotations defined in JSpecify; and an instance of the AbstractKafkaListenerContainerFactory class is now allowed to configure a KafkaAdmin class. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring LDAP
The first milestone release of Spring LDAP 4.2.0 provides bug fixes, dependency upgrades and new features such as: enable post-processing of the DirContextAdapter class in the LdapClient interface before being directed to a ContextMapper or AttributesMapper interface; and the ability to customize the remove-by-value decision within the DirContextAdapter class. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring Web Services
The first milestone release of Spring Web Services 5.1.0 delivers bug fixes, dependency upgrades and new features such as: a new handleInvalidXmlException() method, added to the WebServiceMessageListener class, to support implementation of SOAP/JMS when an InvalidXmlException is thrown; and support for observability by integrating with the Micrometer Observation API for metrics and tracing of web service exchanges. More details on this release may be found in the release notes and this wiki page.