It is my pleasure to announce that the release candidate of Spring Boot 1.4 is available now from the Spring milestone repository. This milestone concludes 6 months of work in the 1.4 line, closing over 140 issues and pull requests! Thanks to everyone that has contributed.

Highlights of the new release include:

• Unified @EntityScan for JPA, MongoDB, Neo4j, Couchbase and Cassandra
• Auto-configured RestTemplateBuilder
• Support for pure rest client tests via @RestClientTest
• Support for Jest (Elasticsearch rest client)
• Upgrades to Spring Integration 4.3, Spring AMQP 1.6, Spring REST Docs 1.1, MongoDB Java Driver 3 and more

For a complete list of changes, and upgrade instructions, see the Spring Boot 1.4 Release Notes on the WIKI and the updated reference documentation.

At this point, it is very important for us that you give 1.4.0.RC1 a try on your projects. Check the QuickStart instruction to upgrade your project to 1.4.0.RC1 or generate an empty project on https://start.spring.io for a concrete example.

In particular, we've decided to revert to Hibernate 5.0 and have already identified a few binary incompatible changes in 5.2. It would be extremely helpful for us to get some feedback, in particular if you are using HibernateTemplate in your project.

Our next stop is 1.4.0.RELEASE scheduled alongside Spring Framework 4.3.2.RELEASE at the end of the month. Stay tuned!