Spring 4.0 Features At a Glance

If you remember, Spring 3.0 released nearly four years back. There is no other major release from the Spring Framework, only the incremental release like 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3. Now they are breaking the ice with Spring Framework 4.0 announcement. It is announced that the new version would be released any time between September or October this year.

The previous incremental release was Spring 3.2 which introduced lot of new features like:

1. Spring MVC Test Framework
2. Asynchronous MVC processing on Servlet 3.0
3. custom @Bean definition annotations in @Configuration classes
4. @Autowired and @Value to be used as meta-annotations
5. Concurrency refinements across the framework
6. loading WebApplicationContexts in the TestContext framework
7. JCache 0.5 (JSR-107)

However, early access libraries are available for the download and can try using the package. But, it is certified for the production only after the official stable release. The entire Java community is eagerly waiting for the next major release from the spring framework. The primary theme for this release is compatibility with Java 8.0 and JEE 7.0 support. Java 8.0 will be release on march 2014.

Update: Spring 4 Released 

• Spring Framework Tutorials
• Spring 4 Tutorials

Most of the new features in Spring 4.0 is the bringing Java 8.0 and JEE 7.0 support for the Spring community.

Spring 4.0 Features

• JSR-335 Lambda expressions
• JSR-310 Date-Time value types for Spring data binding and formatting.
• JSR-343 JMS 2.0.
• JSR-338 JPA 2.1.
• JSR-349 Bean Validation 1.1.
• JSR-236 Java EE 7 Enterprise Concurrency support.
• JSR-356 Spring’s WebSocket endpoint mode.
• Configuring and implementing Spring style application using Groovy 2. Also they specify that first class support for the Groovy applications.
• Also spring plans to add the HATEOS (Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State) support for REST APIs.

Earlier Spring 4.0 is scheduled for the September release, but it is only developer preview in the September. There is not mentioning of the exact date when new version will be available for the production use.  This would be any time in October as stated in their presentations. They continue working on providing the good support for new features in Java 8.0. The delay in the Java 8.0 release is halted their plan for some time.

We will come up with more updates once it is release. Please stay connected with us Subscribe to our social network sites to receive the latest updates.