Dear Spring community,

It's my pleasure to announce the first milestone towards Spring Framework 4.0, delivering a first cut of our work on several key themes:

• the first wave of Java SE 8 / OpenJDK 8 support (some details following below)
• initial support for JMS 2.0, JPA 2.1, Bean Validation 1.1, and JSR-236 concurrency (from the EE 7 umbrella)
• a first cut of our generalized condition mechanism for bean definitions (@Conditional along the lines of @Profile)
• Spring's WebSocket endpoint model (which Rossen will be introducing in more detail soon)

With respect to Java SE 8, we support OpenJDK 8 build 88+ in several areas of the framework:

• support for the 1.8 bytecode format in component scanning and subclass generation
• lambda expressions and method references against Spring callback interfaces
• JSR-310 Date-Time value types for Spring data binding and formatting
• initial support for the JDK 8 parameter name discovery mechanism

Note: Spring's Java 8 support is a work in progress and tracking OpenJDK 8 snapshots on their way to the JDK 8 Developer Preview date in September (see http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk8/). We expect to release a corresponding Spring Framework 4.0 release candidate around that time, to be presented at SpringOne (September 9-12; see http://springone2gx.com).

Along with 4.0 M1, we've released Spring Framework 3.2.3, containing fixes for recently reported issues but also coming with OpenJDK 8 runtime support. Spring Framework 3.2.x will support deployment on JDK 8 runtimes for applications compiled against JDK 7 (with -target 1.7) or earlier. Note that it won't support JDK 8's bytecode format (-target 1.8, as needed for lambdas); please upgrade to Spring Framework 4.0 for that purpose.

Enjoy your first experiences with Spring on OpenJDK 8, and let us know how it works for you!

Cheers, Juergen