We are pleased to announce that Spring Batch 4.1.0.M3 is now available on Github and the Pivotal download repository. What's new in this milestone? Here is a list of new features and enhancements:

JSR-305 support

The main theme of this milestone is adding support for JSR-305 annotations. We leveraged Spring Framework's Null-safety annotations and added them where appropriate in all public APIs of Spring Batch.

These annotations will not only enforce null-safety when using Spring Batch APIs, but also can be used by IDEs to provide useful information related to nullability. For example, if a user wants to implement the ItemReader interface, any IDE supporting JSR-305 annotations will generate something like:

public class MyItemReader implements ItemReader<String> {

	@Nullable
	public String read() throws Exception {
		return null;
	}

}

The @Nullable annotation present on the read method makes it clear that the contract of this method says it may return null. This enforces what is said in its Javadoc, that the read method should return null when the data source is exhausted.

FlatFileItemWriter Builder enhancements

Another small feature added in this release is a simplification of the configuration for the writing of a flat file. Specifically, these updates simplify the configuration of both a delimited and fixed width file. Below is an example of before and after the change.

// Before
@Bean
public FlatFileItemWriter<Item> itemWriter(Resource resource) {
	BeanWrapperFieldExtractor<Item> fieldExtractor = 
            new BeanWrapperFieldExtractor<Item>();
	fieldExtractor.setNames(new String[] {"field1", "field2", "field3"});
	fieldExtractor.afterPropertiesSet();
	
	DelimitedLineAggregator aggregator = new DelimitedLineAggregator();
	aggregator.setFieldExtractor(fieldExtractor);
	aggregator.setDelimiter(";");

	return new FlatFileItemWriterBuilder<Item>()
			.name("itemWriter")
			.resource(resource)
			.lineAggregator(aggregator)
			.build();
}

// After
@Bean
public FlatFileItemWriter<Item> itemWriter(Resource resource) {
	return new FlatFileItemWriterBuilder<Item>()
			.name("itemWriter")
			.resource(resource)
			.delimited()
			.delimiter(";")
			.names(new String[] {"field1", "field2", "field3"})
			.build();
}

Other improvements

This milestone also includes other improvements like:

• Adding the ability to provide a custom transaction manager by subclassing DefaultBatchConfigurer
• Fixing minor inconsistencies in some method names

Feedback

For a complete list of changes, please check the change log. This is the last milestone before the first RC! So we really look forward to hearing your feedback on this milestone! Please feel free to ping @michaelminella or @benas on Twitter or ask your question on StackOverflow or Gitter. If you find any issue, please open a ticket on Jira.

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