Hi, Spring fans, and greetings from the island of St. Barths! Salut depuis l'île de Saint-Barthélemy!

I'm on a bit of PTO and have been bouncing around from one beach to another with my family. I just landed on a winning combination for a beach: warm water, a restaurant/bar, and some for-pay seats with shade. There are precisely three things to do in such a cherished spot: use it as a launchpad for occasional dips in the sea, read, and sleep—usually in that order!

And you know what I've been reading? The wild and wacky antics of the Spring community, of course!

There's a ton of exciting news to dive into, so let's dive really deep into this week's roundup—and then I'll dive really deep into that beautiful blue ocean!

• Spring AI MCP 0.5.0 is now available: Spring AI makes it trivial to build MCP clients and services. MCP, of course, is a protocol that allows you to integrate arbitrary external data sources into your LLMs, like Claude.
• Spring Cloud 2023.0.5 (aka Leyton) is now available: This release includes several updates and fixes—definitely worth checking out!
• In last week's installment of A Bootiful Podcast, I talked to the good, the great, the legendary Dr. Dave Syer. We explored the awesome (and experimental!) new Spring gRPC project.
• Finally, a solution to my often-lamented build time problems with GraalVM: a Maven plugin that plays music while the build is running! Thanks, Richard Fichtner!
• A very practical guide on how to integrate Google Analytics into your Vaadin Flow application.
• Wow! This post on using Spring AI and Vaadin to build an application that accepts images as inputs and then converts them into editable grids of data in a Vaadin UI is something to behold!
• I love SivaLabs' amazing post looking at the JdbcClient, which has been in Spring Framework for more than a year. I have replaced all my JDBC work with the JdbcClient, vastly preferring it to the JdbcTemplate for my work.
• Dhaval Shah has a great post on diving into virtual threads. It’s an insightful read comparing parallel processing with virtual threads, Project Reactor, and the JDK!

Enjoy the updates, and I’ll catch you next week—probably still sandy, sunburned, and thinking about Spring!