Spring 5 Updates

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Spring IO team has announced that they gear up for the next major release Spring 5.0 which is scheduled to be released anytime in the year 2016. The latest update is that, Spring team plans towards a Spring Framework 5 generation, with 5.0 GA in Q4 2016. There is no concrete information about the features that are planned to be added in the next major version Spring 5, but they have highlighted the over all strategy for Spring 5. Spring IO team is actively looking for more feedback from the public on Spring 5 release. There is most likely major shift in minimum requirements for the dependency JARs and Spring core framework features.

About Spring 4

Before start looking at the key points to expect from Spring 5, lets have brief overview on Spring 4 and importants features.

The current version is Spring Framework 4.2, which was released in June 2015. The next planned version is Spring 4.3 which is scheduled to be released on March 2016. Spring 4.3 will be the final major update to the Spring 4 series and it will have support till the year 2019.

The notable features in Spring 4 are:

• Upgraded Spring framework to support JDK 8.
• Spring MVC Test Framework
• Asynchronous MVC processing on Servlet 3.0
• Concurrency refinements across the framework
• JCache 0.5 (JSR-107)
• WebSocket, SockJS, and STOMP Messaging
• Many other minor features are part of the Spring 4 release

Spring 5 Features / Improvements

• The current status of the work shows tha we could expect Spring 5 release before December 2016.
• Watch this page for any updates on the Spring 5 release plans.

Spring 5 Update 1

Here is the list of key points announced in the Spring IO blog:

• Minimum Java requirement will be raised to JDK 8. 
• Also there is upgrade to the minimum Java EE versions. The current minimum version is Servlet 2.5, this will be raised to Servlet 3.0. 
• JPA 1.1+ and Bean Valication API 1.1+ will be the minimum requirements.

There are more details to be announced in the Spring One conference which is scheduled on September 14-17, 2015.

Spring 5 Update 2

As per the latest blog post published here, we could see there is lot more details coming about Spring 5 road map.

• Though there is no details about the features, now it looks like Spring team is close to deciding on what is the base system requirements to run Spring 5 platform.
• The minimum JDK version to be JDK 8 and the code will be developed in the JDK 9, which is scheduled to be released around March 2016. This will enable Spring team to focus easily on the future versions of Java and support more advanced features like HTTP Client API, cuncurrency enhancements, etc.
• You can access the backlogs of Spring 5 list of features in JIRA.