This week spring framework lead Juergen Hoeller has announced in their blog that Spring Framework 4.3 RC1 is released. As we are aware, Spring Framework 4.3 release will be the final release in the Spring 4 series. The next release will be Spring 5 which is a major update to spring framework with Java 9 support and introduction of the Reactive programming to spring framework.

The final release will be on June first week.

Let’s look at the new features added as part of the Spring 4.3:

Dependency Injection Improvements

• @Autowired injection of Map/Collection beans and self-references
• @Autowired on configuration class constructors has been added to this release
• There is no requirement to declare @Autowired on a unique non-default constructor
• ObjectProvider as a richer variant of an ObjectFactory handle
• InjectionPoint/DependencyDescriptor as an injectable argument for @Bean methods

Spring MVC Improvements

• Default processing of OPTIONS, HEAD, Allow and If-Unmodified-Since
• Support for custom HTTP Vary configuration and HTTP Range on custom resources
• Precomposed @GetMapping, @PostMapping, @RequestScope, @SessionScope etc
• @RequestAttribute and @SessionAttribute as handler method arguments
• Full support for Jackson 2.7’s new type resolution algorithm

Overall Framework Updates

• Wider support for composed annotations and for placeholders/expressions in attributes
• Richer programmatic metadata in core container exceptions
• Component scanning in manifest-defined classpath entries
• A background initialization option for bootstrapping JPA / Hibernate
• A ‘sync’ flag on @Cacheable and support for the Caffeine cache provider

I will be covering the new features in my upcoming tutorials. If you wish to get latest updates on spring framework, please subscribe to our newsletter.