As well as general alignment of Spring's JMS support with our spring-messaging module. https://spring.io/blog/2014/04/30/spring-4-1-s-upcoming-jms-improvements

Comprehensive support for JCache (JSR-107) annotations and related features

https://spring.io/blog/2014/04/14/cache-abstraction-jcache-jsr-107-annotations-support https://spring.io/blog/2014/06/16/further-cache-improvements-in-spring-4-1

A compiler mode for the Spring Expression Language (SpEL)

SpEL allows for selective compilation of hotspot expressions into Java bytecode at runtime. Set the "spring.expression.compiler.mode" property to "immediate" or "mixed" and see...

Flexible resolution and transformation of static web resources

See the package javadocs of org.springframework.web.servlet.resource for an initial overview. Stay tuned for further coverage later this week...

Web MVC support for Groovy markup templates

A Spring MVC View implementation based on http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GROOVY-6596. Further coverage to follow...

And many refinements in other areas, for example:

• Java 8's Optional type for injection points and MVC handler method parameters
• Direct field binding support for nested fields and auto-growing of nested field paths
• Declarative MVC view resolution setup, support for Jackson's JsonView mechanism
• A WebSocket scope, SockJS client support, and exposing STOMP/WebSocket stats
• Declarative SQL scripts and programmatic transactions in the TestContext framework

Please give 4.1 RC1 a try! Explore the new features or do some regression testing - we'd like to know how it goes. RC2 is then planned for mid August; GA for the first week of September.

Cheers,

Juergen