Spring was able to stay on schedule, seven months after they publicized their plan, Spring Framework 4.1 General Availability (GA) has been released and is now accessible. The GA announcement has been made by Juergen Hoeller, co-founder of Spring Framework, in Spring’s blog site last September 4.
Spring Framework 4.1, started its development in January 2014 and had its first release candidate in July followed up by a second release candidate last August 15 which includes fixes and improvements. According to Hoeller, the following are the new features being offered in 4.1:
- Upgraded/complete support for: JCache (107) annotations, JMS 2.0, Web MVC support for Groovy markup templates
- Use of simple annotation to create a JMS message listener
- Flexible resolution and transformation of static web resources
- MVC views: declarative resolution, Jackson’s JsonView
- WebSocket STOMP Messaging refinements: WebSocket Scope, SockJS (Java) client support, WebSocket stats
- Performance enhancements: Spring Expression Languange (SpEL) compiler mode, concurrency fine-tuning across the container
He also mentioned a bunch of other improvements made for this release such as:
- Direct field binding support with auto-growing for nested fields
- Java 8’s Optional for injection points and MVC handler parameters
- Support for the standard @Priority annotation for dependency ordering and selection
- Annotated @Lookup methods with support for provided constructor arguments
- Declarative SQL scripts and programmatic transactions in the TestContext framework
- Enhanced Hibernate JPA setup: isolation levels, discovery of managed packages
Additional information on the new features and enhancements can be found here.
Other features that weren’t able to make on this GA release will be included in the 4.2 line which is scheduled on the second quarter of 2015.
Minimum requirements for 4.1 didn’t change, you still need JDK 6+, Servlet 2.5+ and JPA 2.0+ same with Spring Framework 4.0. The 4.1.x line is now the “primary maintenance branch”, therefore, early upgrade to 4.1 is recommended. Since 4.1 line supersedes 4.0.x line, the 4.0.7 has been released together with 4.1’s GA to assist everyone in upgrading.
On the other hand, build snapshot for Spring Framework 4.1.1 is now available, you can start reviewing its API and Reference documentations.