Dear Spring community,

I’m pleased to announce that after an intense release candidate phase, the Spring Framework 4.1 GA release is now available!

Our 4.1 generation delivers major new features along several themes:

* Annotated JMS listener methods

* Comprehensive support for JCache (JSR-107) annotations

* Flexible resolution and transformation of static web resources

* MVC views: declarative resolution, Groovy markup templates, Jackson’s JsonView

* WebSocket refinements: WebSocket scope, SockJS client support, WebSocket stats

* Performance: SpEL compiler mode, concurrency fine-tuning across the container

And as always, 4.1 also comes with a lot of enhancements in the details, for example:

* Direct field binding support with auto-growing for nested fields

* Java 8’s Optional for injection points and MVC handler parameters

* Support for the standard @Priority annotation for dependency ordering and selection

* Annotated @Lookup methods with support for provided constructor arguments

* Declarative SQL scripts and programmatic transactions in the TestContext framework

* Enhanced Hibernate JPA setup: isolation levels, discovery of managed packages

Many of those topics have been covered in recent blog posts already and will also be prominently featured at our SpringOne2GX 2014 show in Dallas next week!

We recommend an early upgrade since the 4.1 line is the primary maintenance branch now, immediately superseding the 4.0.x line. For a more conservative upgrade path, we have co-released 4.0.7 with 4.1 GA - as an intermediate step on your way to 4.1 proper.

Note that Spring Framework 4.1 does not raise the fundamental system requirements: It is still Java 6+, Servlet 2.5+, JPA 2.0+ as outlined for the original Spring Framework 4.0 release, which means it happily runs even on WebSphere 7!

Cheers,

Juergen