Spring 4.0 RC2 has been released and is now available from the SpringSource repository.

This will be the final release candidate before GA, so please give it a try and let us know if you find any issues.

If you are Maven user you may be interested in the new "bill of materials" POM that we have published with this release. You can import the spring-framework-bom project in your dependency management section to ensure that you get consistent Spring Framework dependencies. This is particularly useful when you work with other projects that may have transitive dependencies to earlier versions of…

With the recent RC2 release of Spring Framework 4.0; and GA due before the year's end, here is a little teaser of some of the changes that should improve your life if you work with Java generic types.

Spring has had pretty good Java generics support for a while. For example, with version 3.2 you can easily inject all beans of a specific type into a generic List just by using the @Autowired annotation:

@Autowired
private List<MyType> beans; 
// all beans that extends MyType will be injected

Spring's conversion service, binding system and Web MVC framework are all 'generic aware' and there are also the handy GenericCollectionTypeResolver and GenericTypeResolver…

Spring Boot 0.5.0.M6 has been released and is now available in the Spring repo. Instructions for installing and using are on the project website or in github. There are loads of updates in this release, including:

• Auto-configuration reports to let you know what Spring Boot is doing on your behalf
• Remote shell support via CRaSH
• Support for JDK 8
• A new Aether based @Grab engine
• Lots of bug fixes

Here is a quick example that demonstrates the remote shell and auto-configuration report:

@Grab("spring-boot-starter-shell-remote") 
@Controller 
class MyRemote {
}

When you run this application using spring run example.groovy you should see…

The fifth maintenance release in the Spring Framework 3.2.x line is now available via Maven Central or the SpringSource repository. This release includes nearly 50 bug fixes and improvements and we recommend that all users upgrade.

Documentation | Javadoc API | Change Log | JIRA | GitHub

The fourth maintenance release in the Spring 3.2.x line is now available via Maven Central, the SpringSource repository, or for direct download from our community download page. This release includes numerous bugfixes and improvements including an important security fix for Spring OXM. We recommend that all all users upgrade.

Download | Documentation | Javadoc API | Change Log | JIRA

(This blog post was written jointly by Phil Webb and Dave Syer).

We are pleased to announce the first milestone release of a new project called Spring Boot.

Spring Boot aims to make it easy to create Spring-powered, production-grade applications and services with minimum fuss. It takes an opinionated view of the Spring platform so that new and existing users can quickly get to the bits they need. You can use it to create stand-alone Java applications that can be started using 'java -jar' or more traditional WAR deployments. We also provide a command line tool that runs 'spring scripts'.

The…