Dear Spring community,

I'm pleased to announce that Spring Framework 4.3 GA (a.k.a. 4.3.0.RELEASE) is now available from repo.spring.io as well as Maven Central!

In addition to the feature themes mentioned in my 4.3 RC1 announcement, the GA release covers compatibility with several recent third-party releases, in particular: Hibernate ORM 5.2, Jackson 2.8, Netty 4.1, Undertow 1.4, and Tomcat 8.5.2 / 9.0 M6. Also, please note that our Hibernate 3.x support is finally deprecated (even Hibernate 4.x is not actively supported by Red Hat anymore) and that Spring 4.3's Jackson support requires Jackson 2.6+ now.

Spring Framework 4.3 is designed as a straightforward upgrade for all 4.x users. We will keep supporting the 4.2.x line until the end of this year; however, we recommend an upgrade to 4.3 at your earliest convenience. As previously hinted at, the 4.3.x line will enjoy an extended support life until 2019, within the general Spring Framework 4 system requirements (JDK 6+, Servlet 2.5+) but with a focus on recent servers such as Tomcat 8 and WebSphere 8.

Next up: Spring Framework 5.0, with a first milestone to arrive towards the end of July, just in time for our SpringOne Platform conference in Las Vegas!

Cheers, Juergen