Dear Spring community,

Leading into 2017, the fifth Spring Framework 5.0 milestone is available now. Once again, please check the project page for how to obtain it from our milestone repository.

This is the last milestone before we enter the release candidate phase. Our feature-complete RC1 is planned for early April, initiating a series of release candidates up until June. With this timeline, against near-final releases of OpenJDK 9 and several EE 8 specifications, our 5.0 generation covers early JDK 9 support as well as Servlet 4.0 and Bean Validation 2.0 already.

On another front, 5.0 M5 finally introduces a dedicated name for our reactive web framework: It is my pleasure to publicly announce Spring WebFlux, with the spring-web-reactive module renamed to spring-webflux…

Dear Spring community,

It is my pleasure to announce that the fourth Spring Framework 5.0 milestone is available now, right in time to wrap up 2016! Once again, please check the project page for how to obtain it from our milestone repository and the updated "Reactive Web Applications" documentation.

This milestone brings our reactive efforts close to completion and introduces a functional bean registration facility as well as comprehensive support for the Kotlin language. Stay tuned for a dedicated blog post on Kotlin...

Cheers, Juergen

Dear Spring community,

It is my pleasure to announce that the third Spring Framework 5.0 milestone is available now: Once again, please check the project page for how to obtain it from our milestone repository.

This milestone introduces our redesigned reactive web client as well as redesigned RxJava adapters (including support for the recent RxJava 1.2 and 2.0) and model attribute support for our reactive web dispatcher.

Next up is 5.0 M4 in December, right ahead of Christmas, completing our core reactive stack and our functional design story... before we move towards a first Spring Framework…

Dear Spring community,

It is my pleasure to announce that the second Spring Framework 5.0 milestone is available now: Check http://projects.spring.io/spring-framework/ for how to obtain it from our milestone repository, and keep your feedback coming!

This release introduces a functional web endpoint variant, based on the same foundation as our reactive @Controller model (introduced in 5.0 M1). Stay tuned for Arjen's dedicated blog post, coming up tomorrow! Here's a teaser...

RouterFunction<String> route =
    route(GET("/hello-world"),
        request -> Response.ok().body(fromObject("Hello…

Dear Spring community,

It is my pleasure to announce that the first Spring Framework 5.0 milestone is available now: Check http://projects.spring.io/spring-framework/ for how to obtain it from our milestone repository, and give it a spin while it's hot!

Find out about the 5.0 M1 changes on our What's New wiki page or in more detail on JIRA. Follow our master branch on GitHub for the latest updates.

Most importantly, our Spring Reactive initiative has been merged into Spring Framework proper, with core reactive functionality and reactive web endpoint support available out of the box now. Stay tuned for Rossen's blog post on our reactive…

Dear Spring community,

I'm pleased to announce that Spring Framework 4.3 GA (a.k.a. 4.3.0.RELEASE) is now available from repo.spring.io as well as Maven Central!

In addition to the feature themes mentioned in my 4.3 RC1 announcement, the GA release covers compatibility with several recent third-party releases, in particular: Hibernate ORM 5.2, Jackson 2.8, Netty 4.1, Undertow 1.4, and Tomcat 8.5.2 / 9.0 M6. Also, please note that our Hibernate 3.x support is finally deprecated (even Hibernate 4.x is not actively supported by Red Hat anymore) and that Spring 4.3's Jackson support requires…

Dear Spring community,

It is my pleasure to announce that a feature-complete Spring Framework 4.3 release candidate is available now! This is a perfect opportunity for you to get involved: Please run your regression tests against it, and of course, feel free to try the new features...

Dependency injection refinements:

* @Autowired injection of Map/Collection beans and self references * @Autowired on configuration class constructors (finally!) * No need for declaring @Autowired on a unique non-default constructor * ObjectProvider as a richer variant of an ObjectFactory handle * InjectionPoint/DependencyDescriptor as an injectable argument for @Bean methods

MVC processing refinements:

* Default processing of OPTIONS, HEAD, Allow and If-Unmodified-Since * Support for custom HTTP Vary configuration and HTTP Range on custom resources * Precomposed @GetMapping, @PostMapping, @RequestScope, @SessionScope etc * @RequestAttribute and @SessionAttribute as handler method arguments * Full support for Jackson 2.7's new type resolution algorithm

Various infrastructural refinements across the framework:

* Wider support for composed annotations and for placeholders/expressions in attributes * Richer programmatic metadata in core container exceptions * Component scanning in manifest-defined classpath entries * A background initialization option for bootstrapping JPA / Hibernate * A 'sync' flag on @Cacheable and support for the Caffeine cache provider

We are working towards an RC2 with some remaining fine-tuning and performance improvements in the meantime, preparing for 4.3's general availability on June 1st!

Cheers, Juergen

In early March, I'll be speaking at VoxxedDays Vienna on the 1st, Riga Dev Day on the 2nd, as well as QCon London on the 7th. Aside from my 4.3 component model discussion, I'll also do a Spring Framework 5.0 preview & roadmap talk for the first time (in Riga as well as London).

Looking forward to those shows! See you there...

Juergen

Kicking off 2016, here are my personal recommendations for European developer conferences with particularly strong Spring content in the first half of the year:

• Topconf Linz: Feb 1-3, featuring various Spring-related talks in the Cloud & Microservice Architectures track and a dedicated Spring Boot workshop ahead of the show. An English-language conference in my home-city which happens to be a tech hotspot in Austria...
• JAX Germany: Apr 19-21, with a well-established dedicated Spring track and several Spring-related talks across other conference tracks. Note: JAX is primarily a German-language conference, so the Spring talks there will be delivered in German as well.
• Spring I/O Barcelona: May 19-20, our new annual European Spring conference in its second iteration, at a perfect time for visiting the city of Barcelona! This will…

Dear Spring community,

It is my pleasure to announce that Spring Framework 4.2.4 and 4.1.9 are available from repo.spring.io and Maven Central!

4.2.4 addresses a few regressions in the 4.2.x line and includes many fixes and enhancements, with no immediate issues remaining. 4.2.4 is a recommended upgrade for all 4.x users now. Please note that the 4.2.x line moves into maintenance mode at this point, with a low-volume 4.2.5 maintenance release scheduled for mid February.

4.1.9 is designed as the last release in the 4.1.x line, backporting applicable bug fixes as well as selected recent enhancements from 4.2.3 / 4.2.4. Note that this is the ultimate 4.1.x release: Your next upgrade step beyond 4.1.9 is the above-mentioned 4.2.5 in February, even for compatibility issues and…