Dear Spring community,

It is my pleasure to announce that Spring Framework 6.0.0 is generally available from Maven Central now! This is the start of a new framework generation for 2023 and beyond, embracing current and upcoming innovations in OpenJDK and the Java ecosystem. At the same time, we carefully designed it as a straightforward upgrade from Spring Framework 5.3.x for modern-day runtime environments.

As a major revision of the core framework, Spring Framework 6.0 comes with a Java 17+ baseline and a move to Jakarta EE 9+ (in the jakarta namespace), with a focus on the recently released Jakarta EE 10 APIs such as Servlet 6.0 and JPA 3.1. This provides access to the latest web containers such as Tomcat 10.1 and the latest persistence providers such as Hibernate ORM 6.1. Don't be stuck on Java EE 8, make the leap to the jakarta namespace, ideally straight to the Jakarta EE 10 level! The upcoming Spring Boot 3.0.0 release includes corresponding managed dependencies for you.

Infrastructure-wise, 6.0 introduces a foundation for Ahead-Of-Time transformations and the corresponding AOT processing support for Spring application contexts. This enables first-class support for GraalVM native images with Spring Boot 3. You may also explore Project Loom's virtual threads with Spring applications - see "Embracing Virtual Threads" - and dive into Project CRaC 's checkpoint restore approach for faster JVM startups, both of which are in preview at this point but expected to become first-class features for Spring Framework 6.x based applications.

There are many further features and refinements available in Spring Framework 6.0, e.g. an HTTP interface client, support for RFC 7807 problem details, and Micrometer-based observability for HTTP clients. Please see our What's New page for a comprehensive overview and give 6.0.0 an early try!

Cheers, Juergen

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