There was a flurry of activity in the Spring ecosystem during the week of April 20th, 2026, highlighting the first release candidates of: Spring Boot, Spring Security, Spring Integration, Spring Modulith, Spring AMQP, Spring for Apache Kafka and Spring Vault.
Spring Boot
The first release candidate of Spring Boot 4.1.0 delivers bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: support for the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) SDK exporter environment variables; and support the Spring Framework LazyConnectionDataSourceProxy class for improved transaction management. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring Security
The first release candidate of Spring Security 7.1.0 ships with bug fixes, dependency upgrades and new features such as: a new method, anyOf(), added to the AllRequiredFactorsAuthorizationManager class, that grants access to a resource via the AuthorizationManager interface; and support for the new Spring Framework PreFlightRequestFilter class, a servlet filter that handles pre-flight requests. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring Session
The first release candidate of Spring Session 4.1.0 provides documentation improvements to reflect support for Spring Boot 4.x. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring Integration
The first release candidate of Spring Integration 7.1.0 delivers bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: a refactor of the RedisLockRegistry class that takes advantage of the Redis 8.4+ Compare-and-Set (CAS) and Compare-and-Delete (CAD) native commands for lock renewal and release; and improvements to the JmsChannelFactoryBean class that allows users to set a custom instance of the Spring Framework JmsTemplate class instead of using the default. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes and this what's new page.
Spring Modulith
The first release candidate of Spring Modulith 2.1.0 ships with bug fixes, dependency upgrades and improvements such as: a new @ModuleSlicing annotation that eliminates integration test failures on multiple types annotated with @SpringBootApplication; and improved transaction handling in JobRunr by decorating the Java DataSource interface, fed into the JobRunr StorageProvider interface, to ensure that Spring transactions are considered as expected for event externalization. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring AMQP
The first release candidate of Spring AMQP 4.1.0 provides bug fixes, dependency upgrades and new features such as: a new method, setStopListenerOnFatal(), added to the ConditionalRejectingErrorHandler class, that now treats a fatal error as "fatal" for the listener, not the message; and improvements to the @EnableAmqp annotation that semantically aligns with its @EnableRabbit counterpart. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring for Apache Kafka
The first release candidate of Spring for Apache Kafka 4.1.0 delivers bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: a new ContainerProperties.ShareAckMode enum class that maps use cases (explicit mode, implicit mode and manual) to a clear name for shared consumers; and support for the Apache Kafka AcknowledgementCommitCallback interface that provides visibility into the success or failure of asynchronous commits. More details on this release may be found in the release notes and this what's new page.
Spring LDAP
The first release candidate of Spring LDAP 4.1.0 ships with one bug fix, dependency upgrades and two new features: the removal of constraints with the dependency on JUnit 4; and a refactor of the LdapClient interface that adds various single, optional, list, and stream methods to align with the Spring Framework JdbcClient interface. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring Vault
The first release candidate of Spring Vault 4.1.0 provides bug fixes, dependency upgrades and one new feature that builds on the recent release of HashiCorp Vault 2.0. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.