Dear Spring community,

It is my pleasure to announce that a feature-complete Spring Framework 4.3 release candidate is available now! This is a perfect opportunity for you to get involved: Please run your regression tests against it, and of course, feel free to try the new features…

Dependency injection refinements:

@Autowired injection of Map/Collection beans and self references

@Autowired on configuration class constructors (finally!)

No need for declaring @Autowired on a unique non-default constructor

ObjectProvider as a richer variant of an ObjectFactory handle

InjectionPoint/DependencyDescriptor as an injectable argument for @Bean methods

MVC processing refinements:

Default processing of OPTIONS, HEAD, Allow and If-Unmodified-Since

Support for custom HTTP Vary configuration and HTTP Range on custom resources

Precomposed @GetMapping, @PostMapping, @RequestScope, @SessionScope etc

@RequestAttribute and @SessionAttribute as handler method arguments

Full support for Jackson 2.7’s new type resolution algorithm

Various infrastructural refinements across the framework:

Wider support for composed annotations and for placeholders/expressions in attributes

Richer programmatic metadata in core container exceptions

Component scanning in manifest-defined classpath entries

A background initialization option for bootstrapping JPA / Hibernate

A ‘sync’ flag on @Cacheable and support for the Caffeine cache provider

We are working towards an RC2 with some remaining fine-tuning and performance improvements in the meantime, preparing for 4.3’s general availability on June 1st!

Cheers,

Juergen