I am pleased to announce that the first release candidate for Spring Boot 1.2.0 is available now in the Spring milestone repository. This release adds a number of improvements and new features over M2. Highlights include:

• Tomcat 8 or Jetty 9 as the default embedded servlet container (providing Servlet 3.1 support).
• A new @SpringBootApplication annotation.
• Access to start.spring.io using the spring init CLI command.
• Email support including a new spring-boot-starter-mail "starter POM".
• Additional health and metrics endpoints.

For a complete list of changes, and for upgrade instructions, see the Spring Boot 1.2 Release Notes on the WIKI. The reference documentation also continues to be updated to cover the new features.

Thanks again to everyone that has contributed to the release! We're planning one more release candidate before we go GA, so please do give it a go and report any problems using the project Issue tracker.