Dear Spring community,

I'm pleased to announce that the third Spring Framework 5.0 release candidate is available!

This release comes with refined nullability declarations (including the field and bean property level), even stronger Kotlin support (with a declarative bean definition DSL and support for default constructor arguments on Kotlin data classes), as well as several API refinements in Spring WebFlux. Furthermore, Spring Framework 5.0 RC3 ships against Reactor 3.1 M3 and JUnit 5.0 M6 and is fully tested against the recent JDK 9 release candidate.

With respect to our remaining roadmap, despite being feature-complete already, we opted for an extended release candidate phase. This allows for further hardening of our revised APIs and in particular for a proper upgrade to Reactor 3.1 GA, JUnit 5.0 GA and Jackson 2.9 GA (all expected by early September). As a consequence, we are aiming for our Spring Framework 5.0 GA release in September now, close to JDK 9's general availability target.

Cheers, Juergen