When will Spring Boot 2.2 land in JHipster?

Why do I care about Spring Boot 2.2 again?

JHipster builds upon Spring Boot, and Spring Boot, in turn, builds upon the Spring Framework. The Spring Framework has a big release every September, with Spring Boot incorporating that release within a month or two. Now this year, Spring 5.2 brought “many performance improvements (affecting startup time as well as peak performance)” on September 30, 2019, and Spring Boot 2.2 promised on October 16, 2019, that “applications will now start even faster and consume less memory while they do so.”

So with Spring Boot 2.2, applications start up faster and use less memory:

• The faster start-up time is helpful during development where you restart the application all the time.
• And using less memory makes it cheaper to run in the cloud and other environments where you pay by memory.

Wonderful. Now, when can we get this in JHipster, please?

Great, is this in JHipster already?

The most recent release of JHipster is version 6.5.1 from November 19, 2019 — and it still has the old Spring Boot 2.1 and Spring 5.1. And don’t hold your breath for a quick Spring Boot 2.2 appearance: The last time around, it took 7.5 months to get Spring Boot 2.1 into JHipster!

Wait, what? 7.5 months? Why?

So what’s the hold-up?

In one word: Dependencies. JHipster includes many libraries, and they all need to move to the new version of Spring Boot first. So let me recap what happened with Spring Boot 2.1:

• September 21, 2018: Spring 5.1 is released.
• October 30, 2018: Spring Boot 2.1 is released.
• January 23, 2019: Spring Cloud Greenwich (version 2.1) is released, the last significant new Java dependency for JHipster.
• May 2, 2019: JHipster 6.0 goes GA with Spring Boot 2.1.

Spring Cloud is a hold-up again. This time, it’s the Hoxton release (version 2.2), which hopefully will be out by the end of November (formerly due November 7). If the remaining work then takes as long as it did the last time, we’re looking at March 2020 for the release of JHipster with Spring Boot 2.2. I hope it goes faster this time!

This JHipster Github issue tracks the upgrade to Spring Boot 2.2. Subscribe to it if you want to follow the progress of Spring Boot 2.2 in JHipster!