Spring Boot 1.1.0.M2 is available now in the Spring repositories. There are quite a few new features and plenty of new documentation:

• Groovy Template and Velocity support for MVC and offline rendering.

• Big changes to the HealthIndicator interface and the existing implementations, e.g. all database backends (like Mongo etc.) have a default HealthIndicator and the Actuator aggregates them all up into a single readout.

• Support for Spring Data Solr and Spring Data Gemfire, and upgrade to the Spring Data Dijkstra release train

• Support for multiple DataSources through a convenient

DataSourceBuilder abstraction, plus a similar feature for JPA EntityManagerFactories

• Upgrades to various new versions of existing dependencies, e.g. Spring Batch 3.0, Spring Security 3.2.4

My favourite new feature is the ability to add @ConfigurationProperties to @Beans directly (as opposed to at the type level). This enables you to bind external properties to 2 instances of the same type, with different prefixes, e.g.

@Bean
@Primary
@ConfigurationProperties(prefix="datasource.primary")
public DataSource primaryDataSource() {
    return DataSourceBuilder.create().build();
}

@Bean
@ConfigurationProperties(prefix="datasource.secondary")
public DataSource secondaryDataSource() {
    return DataSourceBuilder.create().build();
}

In this example we bind to two beans of the same type. The concrete type of those beans might be a Tomcat DataSource or a HikariCP DataSource, so this shows that you can also use @ConfigurationProperties on @Beans to bind to types that you don't control (and don't have @ConfigurationProperties already).

We have many community members to thanks again for their contributions to this release (we are up to around 80 committers now, and there are others who help out with discussions and feedback). Keep up the good work! The plan is to get to RC1 next week and a GA release very soon after that, so please keep trying out the new features and send feedback via github.