I'm pleased to announce that Spring Framework 3.0.2 is available now, including more than 100 fixes for user-reported issues. Get it from our download page.

Spring 3.0.2 catches up with recent third-party releases such as Hibernate 3.5 final, OpenJPA 2.0 beta 3, Hessian 4.0.3, and JasperReports 3.7. In addition, this release introduces web support refinements (e.g. the new HttpEntity class) and fixes a couple of regressions.

We recommend upgrading to Spring 3.0.2 from all previous Spring 3.0 releases - for both development and production use. If you are currently using Spring 2.5, the 3.0.2 release is the recommended entry point into the world of Spring 3 now. Enjoy!

P.S.:

Since there were several questions about supported third-party versions, let me summarize our general approach quickly: Spring ships with build dependencies on specific library versions (e.g. Hibernate 3.3.1) but at the same time supports a range of versions at runtime (e.g. Hibernate from version 3.2 up to 3.5). The specific library versions that Spring builds against are generally not the 'recommended' versions but rather just the most suitable ones for us to build against.

So in terms of choosing a library version for use with Spring in your application, simply speaking, feel free to pick your favorite version - very recent or a couple of years old. Spring as a framework won't unnecessarily constrain you in that choice; we are even actively trying to support a range of popular versions. Wherever we require a minimum version of a third-party library for specific features, our components (e.g. LocalSessionFactoryBean) will usually tell you so in their javadoc.