Spring Ecosystem Milestone Releases: Boot 4.1 M3, Security 7.1 M3, Data 2026.0 M2

What Was Announced

The week of March 16, 2026 brought third milestone releases for Spring Boot, Spring Security, Spring Integration, Spring AI, and Spring AMQP, as well as a second milestone for Spring Data. These are pre-release builds intended for early feedback — not yet ready for production — but they give a clear picture of what Spring 2026 will look like when it ships later this year.

Key Features and Changes

Spring Boot 4.1.0 M3

The third milestone of Spring Boot 4.1 introduces two notable features:

• AMQP 1.0 specification support — Auto-configuration for the AmqpConnectionFactory and AmqpClient interfaces, making it straightforward to connect to AMQP 1.0 brokers (such as ActiveMQ Artemis or Azure Service Bus) without manual bean setup.
• Spring Batch + MongoDB module — A new spring-boot-batch-data-mongo module provides auto-configuration for Spring Batch when using MongoDB as the job repository, removing the need for custom JobRepository configuration that was previously required.

Spring Security 7.1.0 M3

Key additions in this milestone:

• MessageExpressionAuthorizationManager — A new class for applying SpEL-based authorization expressions to message-based security (e.g. WebSocket messages or Spring Integration channels). This brings message security closer to the expressiveness already available for HTTP security.
• InetAddressMatcher — A new interface for IP address-based access control, replacing the older IpAddressMatcher with a cleaner API that handles both IPv4 and IPv6 correctly.

Spring Data 2026.0.0 M2

Spring Data's milestone brings concrete new APIs:

• @EnableRedisListeners in Spring Data Redis — Annotation-driven setup for Redis keyspace notifications and pub/sub listeners.
• bulkWrite() in Spring Data MongoDB — A batch write operation for MongoDB that sends multiple insert, update, and delete operations in a single round-trip, significantly reducing latency for bulk data operations.
• Compare-and-set / compare-and-delete for Redis 8.4 — New operations aligned with Redis 8.4's atomic CAS primitives, useful for distributed locking and optimistic concurrency patterns.

Spring AI and Spring AMQP M3

Both Spring AI and Spring AMQP also received their third milestone releases, with Spring AI continuing to evolve its support for tool calling, multimodal inputs, and streaming responses across multiple LLM providers.

Why It Matters for Developers

The MongoDB batch module for Spring Batch is particularly welcome — setting up a Mongo-backed JobRepository has been a friction point for teams that run MongoDB-only stacks. The new module handles the schema, transaction management, and serialization automatically.

The AMQP 1.0 auto-configuration matters for teams working with cloud-native messaging on Azure or AWS (both support AMQP 1.0 natively), reducing the boilerplate needed to integrate Spring Boot applications with managed broker services.

These milestones are worth testing against your codebase now to identify API incompatibilities before the final release.

Source

Read the original article — InfoQ