The OpenLiberty project has released OpenLiberty 26.0.0.5, with official support for Jakarta EE 11 across Core, Web, and Platform profiles, and support for Spring Boot 4 JAR files as opposed to WAR files. Jakarta EE 11 adds one important specification: Jakarta Data.
Github user asmo0dey has created an application that provides live audience polling for slidev presentations, using docker, Spring, vue, and either PostgreSQL or H2. It's got a lot of benefit for presentations, of course, but it also looks designed well.
Piotr Minkowski's new article on Spring Kafka offset behavior ("Deep Dive into Kafka Offset Commit with Spring Boot") goes into how Spring's Kafka reader commits read offsets: it treats the read operation as a committable transaction, which means your code needs to be aware of the offset write semantics to make sure you don't lose messages. Kafka is powerful precisely because it's not a simple queue - messages can be replayed via offset manipulation - but that same model means offset commit semantics matter in ways they never would with a fire-and-forget message broker.