Next Spring to be 4.0

SpringSource head developer Juergen Hoeller has announced that the next iteration of the Spring Framework will arrive with a 4.0 version number. The announcement comes a month after the release of Spring 3.2 which he calls "a natural conclusion to the 3.x line".

The Spring 3.x series has focused on Java-based configuration, REST, Java SE 7 and Servlet 3.0 support. For Spring 4.0, Hoeller says the plan is to focus on the "emerging enterprise themes in 2013 and beyond". Specifically, that means fully supporting Java SE 8's features such as lambda expressions and the JSR-310 Date and Time API and supporting Java EE 7 technologies such as JMS 2.0, JPA 2.1, Bean Validation, Servlet 3.1 and JCache.

The Groovy 2 language is also set to become capable of configuring and implementing entire Spring-style applications. WebSocket based architectures using JSR-356 are also planned for support. At a more detailed level, Hoeller says Spring 4.0 should support fine-grained events and messaging and be somewhat tidier after pruning deprecated features and pulling minimum dependencies up to Java 6 or later.

The development work is expected to be a one-year iteration with a 4.0 GA version arriving by the end of 2013 and a 4.0 milestone tracking OpenJDK 8 as early as April 2013. Hoeller promises more details on schedules as the developers get closer to the first milestone release.

Hoeller co-founded the Spring Framework project with Rod Johnson over ten years ago and it revolutionised enterprise Java development. In 2004, they created SpringSource, the company, which was bought five years later in 2009 by VMware. Johnson left SpringSource in July 2012.

(djwm)