What’s This About?
The core Spring framework just got its last major 5.x release with version 5.3 on October 27, 2020. We didn’t get a new Spring Boot release yet: Spring Boot 2.4 is still due for November 12, 2020.
What’s in the Release?
- It has bindings for the records preview in JDK 15.
- Spring gets reactive: For JDBC access with Spring Data R2DBC, and for multipart requests in WebFlux.
- RSocket, the binary byte stream protocol for TCP and WebSockets, is now at version 1.1.
- Talking about bytes streams: We can now use the Kotlin multiplatform serialization in Spring.
- Finally, MockMvc gets a unified API, full HTTP tests, and a revised Kotlin DSL.
Should I Upgrade?
No. This is a major Spring release. So it’ll be a while until all your dependencies catch up. And if you use Spring Boot, you have to at least wait for Spring Boot 2.4.0 (November 12).
Where Can I Get It?
You update the version numbers in your Maven/Gradle build files. Please tell me that nobody uses Ant anymore!
When Is the Next Big Spring Release Due?
Spring 6.0 will probably be out in the fall of 2021. My guesses: It will need JDK 11 and fully support GraalVM native images.