Spring 4.x Features

Spring 4.0 was released in December 2013 and developers are migrating to it gradually. New Java projects are recommended to adopt it directly. It was one of the major version release for Spring framework. Major features on Spring 4 is the complete support for Java SE 8 and Groovy. Following are the Spring 4.x features highlights and lets see about each of them in detail in coming tutorials.

Spring 4.0 Features

• Many improvements to Spring Core Container like generics as autowiring qualifiers, conditional annotation, ordered auto wiring qualifiers and ordered auto wiring into lists and arrays.
• Complete support for Java 8 features. One important point to note is, minimum requirement to using Spring 4 is Java SE6. Similarly requires Servlet 3.0+ for Spring Web modules
• Supports conditional Bean Creation.
• Spring 4.0.x has added modules new spring-websocket and spring-messaging for WebSocket-based communication and support STOMP.
• Support for external bean configuration using Groovy DSL.
• Supports SockJS, STOMP Messaging and Java Websocket API.
• Improvements to RestTemplate
• Loads of improvements to Spring Test module.
• Lots of third party dependencies have been upgraded their respective latest versions. Like Hibernate 3.6+, EhCache 2.1+, Quartz 1.8+, Groovy 1.8+, and Joda-Time 2.0+.
• Removed many deprecated packages and methods

Spring 4.1 Improvements

Spring 4.1.5 was released on February 20, 2015 with lots of new features and improvements.

• Many improvements to Spring JMS Module. Added new annotations and also provided some improvements to “jms:annotation-driven”namespace.
• Many improvements to Spring Web modules
• Improvements to WebSocket module
• Improvements to SockJS &STOM Messaging
• Improvements to Spring Test module
• Improvements in Spring Cache
• Supports JCache Annotations

If you are using Spring framework it is good time to upgrade to Spring 4.x