Rod Johnson Is Back - and He's Bringing AI Agents to Java

If you have written enterprise Java in the last 20 years, you know the name Rod Johnson. He created Spring Framework back in 2003 - the thing that made Java dependency injection feel natural instead of like wrestling XML. Spring basically rewrote how enterprise Java works. Johnson stepped away from active Spring development years ago. But in early 2026, he returned - and he did not come back to build another IoC container. He built Embabel. An AI agent framework for the JVM. And it works nothing like Spring AI or LangChain4j. I have been running AI agents on my own VPS for months. Hermes Agent, Claude Code, custom MCP servers - the works. So when I heard Rod Johnson was back with a Java AI framework, I paid attention. Here is what I found. Spring AI and LangChain4j Are Great - but They Solve a Different Problem Over the last year, most Java developers entering AI have gravitated toward two frameworks: Spring AI - brings LLM integration into the Spring ecosystem LangChain4j - a Java port of LangChain's agent/tool patterns Both are excellent at what they do. You can build chatbots, RAG pipelines, tool-calling assistants, and AI-powered APIs in a few lines of code. But both treat the LLM as the center of the application. You send a prompt. The model responds. Maybe it calls a tool. Then it responds again. For question-answering or chat interfaces, that is fine. But what if you want the system to: Create a multi-step plan before taking any action Run for 10 minutes, not 10 seconds Check its own work and retry if it failed Coordinate multiple agents working on different parts of a problem This is where the chatbot pattern breaks down. And this is exactly what Embabel targets. What Is Embabel? Embabel (pronounced em-BAY-bel) is a framework for building goal-oriented AI agents on the JVM. It is written in Kotlin and works naturally from Java. It sits on top of Spring AI - Johnson described the relationship as "Spring AI is to Embabel as the Servlet API is to Spring MVC" [