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