The annual SpringOne conference was held online last September 1-2 due to an epidemic, and Pivotal (the owner of the Spring Project) hosts this conference once a year to meet with thousands of developers, customers and partners from around the world to share technical practices and discuss technology trends. Each conference also reveals the next big step in the Spring Project’s evolution. The highlight of this year’s conference is definitely Spring Framework 6.0. Let’s take a look at Spring’s roadmap for the coming period.

Spring Framework 5.3.x

Let’s start by looking at some of the plans for Spring Framework 5.3.x.

Spring Framework 5.3.x

Emphasis on Spring Boot 2.6 and 2.7 will be based on this version .

Spring Framework 6.0

The high profile release is Spring Framework 6.0. It will be based on Java 17 and Jakarta EE 9. It now looks like this.

Spring Framework 6.0

Spring 6.0 will be the new beginning of the next decade of Spring . What can be revealed so far is.

  • The Spring 6.0 development branch will be finalized by the end of September.
  • A milestone release of Spring 6.0 by the end of 2021.
  • Mid-2022 Spring 6.0 release official candidate (RC) version.
  • When Spring 6.0 will be officially released is not yet determined, but it is likely to follow the six-month rule of Spring Boot.
  • Spring 6.0 will be a big update, with lots of new stuff.
  • You’ll be interested in the Spring 6.0 release features.

Spring Framework 6.0 Roadmap

Spring has also officially announced the release roadmap for Spring 6.0. You can see the Spring 6 specific release timeline.

Spring 6.0

Key Points for Spring Framework 5.3 to 6.0

Exclusion points and change points

  • Possibly XML configuration format will become a thing of the past.
  • Some Java EE APIs (EJB, JCA, JAX-WS) are out of date.
  • RPC support (not sure how to translate HTTP Invoker) expired

Migration to Jakarta EE 9+

  • jakarta.servlet (Tomcat 10, Jetty 11 related).
  • jakarta.persistence (Hibernate ORM 6?).

Cloud Native

Improved support for GraalVM and Project Leyden (a Java static graph project).

Spring Boot 3.0

It is certain that Spring Boot 3 is based on Spring Framework 6 and that Spring Boot 3 will completely open the way to cloud-native.

Spring Boot 3

What is predicted is that the official release of Spring Boot 3 will be at the end of Q4 2022.

Java 17

The release of Java 17 will kick off a new era of Spring.

Reference https://felord.cn/springframework-6.htmls