Tucanoo Solutions Ltd

01/10/2026

Groovy Server Pages, the view technology behind Grails, can now be used in an ordinary Spring Boot application. Our new tutorial builds a small app with it from scratch, covering layouts, a custom tag library and styling, and compares it with the same app built in Thymeleaf. All of the code is free on GitHub.

Read the tutorial →

Grails 8 lets an ordinary Spring Boot application use Groovy Server Pages as its view layer, with no Grails application around it. We build a small quest board with SiteMesh layouts, a Groovy tag library and the asset pipeline, then compare it with the same app in Thymeleaf.

20/08/2026

Since March, Chrome has been disabling the unload event for a growing share of page loads, 80% from 25 August and all of them from 22 September. Code that saves work or notifies a server when a page closes can simply stop running, with no error and no deploy to blame, and because the rollout is percentage-based the failures look intermittent.

Our new guide explains why the failures look random, shows the header that restores the old behaviour immediately, and then walks through the proper fix for each kind of handler, from save-on-exit code to cross-window signalling, in any stack including server-rendered templates.

Read the full guide →

Chrome disables the unload event on 80% of page loads from 25 August 2026. See who's affected, how to find your handlers, and the fix for each use-case.

21/07/2026

Spring Boot 4.1 now includes gRPC support in the framework itself, and most guides online still describe the old setup. Our new tutorial builds a working gRPC server and client on the current release, then keeps going: health checks, TLS, error handling, automated tests, distributed tracing, and finally a head-to-head benchmark against REST on the same service. Everything was built and run for real, and the complete project is free to clone on GitHub.

Read the tutorial →

Spring Boot 4.1 moved gRPC auto-configuration into Spring Boot itself. Server, client, TLS, health, observability and a REST-vs-gRPC benchmark, built and run for real.

17/07/2026

Two tax deadlines matter more than anything else in the government's digital support plan for small businesses: Making Tax Digital rolling out through 2028, and mandatory e-invoicing from April 2029. The June progress update also points to free help available now (training, advisers, and a free consultancy pilot if you're in the West of England), though there are no grants for software yet. What this means for your next software decision →

The government's SME digital adoption plan promises much. Here's what support actually exists today, what's still a promise, and how to use it

11/07/2026

The EU AI Act's high-risk rules have been pushed back to 2 December 2027. Most of the Act still starts on 2 August 2026 though, and that includes rules that apply to everyday software: users have to be told when they're talking to AI, and AI-generated content has to be marked as such. UK companies are in scope whenever EU customers use their product.

We've written a plain-English guide for UK business owners and CTOs covering the new dates, what still applies this August, and how to work out whether any of your AI features fall into the high-risk category.

Full post ->

The EU has pushed high-risk AI Act obligations to December 2027. What's delayed, what still applies from August 2026, and what UK firms should do.

10/07/2026

Spring Boot 3.5 reached end of OSS support on 30 June 2026. That means no more free security patches for any 3.x application, and vulnerability scanners have already started flagging it.

We've published a complete migration guide for moving from 3.5 to 4.x, researched the way we'd want it as engineers: every breaking change verified against primary sources, real error messages quoted with their fixes (including the ones that fail silently, like schema migrations that stop running and Batch metadata that quietly moved in-memory), a decision framework for whether to migrate now or buy time, and a compatibility table for the third-party libraries that actually block upgrades.

Read the full guide →

OSS support for Spring Boot 3.5 ended on 30 June 2026. If you’re running any 3.x release in production today, you’re on an unsupported framework unless you’re paying for commercial support. This guide covers the migration from Spring Boot 3.5 to Spring Boot 4.x in full: what changed, what ...

30/06/2026

We wanted to show what Spring AI's agentic tooling looks like on something closer to a real project than the usual weather-API demo, so we built an example Spring Boot API: a civic research assistant. You give it a plain-English issue and a UK postcode, and it tells you the most effective way to raise that issue with Parliament. It uses an LLM (ChatGPT) along with the free UK postcode and Open Parliament APIs. The flow isn't dictated in code. We register a handful of tools (resolve the postcode, find the MP, search bills, find committees and open inquiries, check the voting record) and let the model decide which to call and in what order. It chains them itself and returns a final answer with a citation on every claim. Built with Java 25, Spring Boot 4.1 and Spring AI 2.0, with the full tutorial and code on the blog.

Read it here 👉 https://tucanoo.com/building-an-agentic-workflow-in-java-multi-step-ai-agents-with-spring-ai-and-tool-calling/

A complete, runnable Java tutorial: build a multi-step AI agent with Spring AI 2.0 and Spring Boot 4.1 that calls live UK Parliament APIs, grounds every claim in a citation, and refuses to state anything it can't back up — covering the grounding, safety, testing and cost concerns most tutorials sk...

26/06/2026

There isn't much out there showing how to use SSE (Server-Sent Events) with a Spring Boot back end connected to an LLM to power a ChatGPT-style Next.js front end, so we've made it the focus of our latest tutorial on the Tucanoo blog, with the full working code as always.

https://tucanoo.com/streaming-llm-responses-end-to-end-a-spring-boot-sse-backend-and-a-next-js-frontend/

21/06/2026

Ever wondered whether those new Java "virtual threads" actually do anything for a real app? 🧵

We ran the experiment: one ordinary Spring Boot service, one config flag flipped, and a careful before-and-after. The short version — about 6× more requests per second from a single line of code… but with a catch most tutorials skip: the bottleneck doesn't disappear, it just moves somewhere new.

We've published the whole thing — the numbers, the charts, and a repo you can run yourself.

👉 https://tucanoo.com/virtual-threads-in-spring-boot-4

18/06/2026

Adding AI to your business doesn't have to mean a huge, risky project.

Most AI efforts fail for organisational reasons, not technical ones — so the smart move for small and medium businesses is to start small: automate one repetitive task well, prove the value, then scale.
Our new guide is a practical, step-by-step roadmap for adding AI agents to the software you already use — covering where to start, how to keep it safe and compliant with the new UK rules, what it costs, and how to get a return within 12–18 months.
Read it here: https://tucanoo.com/adding-ai-agents-existing-business-software-roadmap-smes/
We offer UK SMEs a free consultation to identify a sensible first step — get in touch.