spring releases

Spring

2004: 1.0 2006: 2.0 2007: 2.5 2009: 3.0 2011: 3.1 2013: 3.2 2015: 4.2 2016: 4.3

2017

5.0

• Spring WebFlux: A new reactive web framework (WebFlux) built on Reactor 3.1, offering a non-blocking alternative to Spring MVC, supporting servers like Netty, Undertow, and Jetty.
• Functional Endpoints: A new functional programming model for web endpoints, using HandlerFunction and RouterFunction, offering a more library-centric, customizable approach than annotation-heavy controllers.
• First-Class Kotlin Support: Null-safe APIs, functional bean definitions, functional routing DSL, and Kotlin constructor autowiring.
• Java 8+ Baseline: Required Java 8 (or higher) and leveraged features like streams and NIO.2.
• Ready for JDK 9: Fully compatible with JDK 9's module path (as automatic modules) and classpath.

2020

5.3

• spring-r2dbc Module: Introduced core R2DBC (Reactive Relational Database Connectivity) support with R2dbcTransactionManager and DatabaseClient for reactive database access.
• Spring Native Foundations: Core refinements and optimizations for ahead-of-time (AOT) processing, benefiting both native and JVM deploymen

2022

6.0

• JDK 17+ and Jakarta EE 9+ Baseline: Spring Framework 6.0 requires Java 17 or higher and fully embraces Jakarta EE 9+

2024

6.1

• Virtual Threads: First-class support, including VirtualThreadTaskExecutor, enabling massive scalability for blocking apps with minimal code changes.
• Project CRaC (Checkpoint/Restore): Integration for JVM checkpoint/restore capabilities. 6.2
• Background Initialization: Initialize certain beans in the background using @Bean(bootstrap = BACKGROUND).

2025

7.0

• Built-in Resilience: Core annotations like @Retryable and @ConcurrencyLimit simplify handling failures, reducing reliance on external libraries like Spring Retry.
• Baseline Upgrades: Requires JDK 17+ (recommends JDK 25), Jakarta EE 11, and integrates Kotlin 2.2 & GraalVM 25.