There was a flurry of activity in the Spring ecosystem during the week of October 20th, 2025, highlighting first release candidates of Spring Boot, Spring Security, Spring for GraphQL, Spring Integration, Spring Modulith, Spring REST Docs, Spring Batch and Spring for Apache Pulsar.
Spring Boot
The first release candidate of Spring Boot 4.0.0 delivers bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: support for the new Spring Framework RestTestClient interface; and completion of modularizing the codebase to “reduce the size of a typical Spring Boot application and provide stronger auto-configuration signals.” More details on this release may be found in the release notes and this wiki page.
Spring Security
The first release candidate of Spring Security 7.0.0 provides bug fixes, dependency upgrades and new features such as: a new @EnableGlobalMultiFactorAuthentication annotation that exposes an instance of the DefaultAuthorizationManagerFactory class as a bean; and a new FactorGrantedAuthority class that represents an authority granted to an instance of the Authentication interface. More details on this release, including breaking changes, may be found in the release notes.
Spring for GraphQL
The first release candidate of Spring for GraphQL 2.0.0 delivers bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: new Kotlin extensions of the GraphQlClient and GraphQlTester interfaces; and a new HttpRequestHeaderInterceptor class that can copy HTTP headers of interest into an instance of the GraphQL for Java GraphQLContext class. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes and this wiki page.
Spring Session
The first release candidate of Spring Session 4.0.0 ships with bug fixes, dependency upgrades and new features: a modernization of the Antora documentation site generation builds that updates to the latest Spring conventions; and the addition of new exclusions to the nohttp Gradle plugin. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring Integration
The first release candidate of Spring Integration 7.0.0 provides bug fixes, dependency upgrades and new features such as: new channel adapters based on Spring AMQP 4.0; and the directory for scanning, using an instance of the FileReadingMessageSource class, may now be configured as an expression for evaluation at runtime. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring Modulith
The first release candidate of Spring Modulith 2.0.0 delivers bug fixes, dependency upgrades and new features such as: removal of the deprecated @ApplicationEventListener annotation; and support for executing Flyway database migrations on startup. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring REST Docs
The first release candidate of Spring REST Docs 4.0.0 ships with dependency upgrades and new features: an alignment with JUnit 6.0 as the minimal supported version; and a temporary drop in support for REST-Assured until it is compatible with Groovy 5.0. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes and this wiki page.
Spring Batch
The first release candidate of Spring Batch 6.0.0 provides big fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: a more graceful shutdown of batch jobs to ensure that interruption signals are correctly sent to running steps; and support for Staged Event Driven Architecture (SEDA) processing at scale using messaging channels offered by Spring Integration. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring AMQP
The first release candidate of Spring AMQP 4.0.0 delivers dependency upgrades and resolutions to notable issues such as: the third parameter, allowEagerInit, in the getBeansOfType(Class, boolean, boolean) method, defined in the Spring Framework ListableBeanFactory interface, when set to true causes eager instantiation of all instances of the FactoryBean interface in the application context, even those marked with lazy-init="true". This breaks lazy initialization semantics for beans. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes and what’s new page.
Spring for Apache Kafka
The first release candidate of Spring for Apache Kafka 4.0.0 ships with bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: concurrency support to ShareKafkaMessageListenerContainer class to avoid parent/child container complexity; and a change to the constructor signature of the DeadLetterPublishingRecoverer class to accept ? extends KafkaOperations such that an instance of the KafkaTemplate class, an implementation of the KafkaOperations interface, may be used as a parameter. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring for Apache Pulsar
The first release candidate of Spring for Apache Pulsar 2.0.0 provides dependency upgrades and a resolution to the deadLetterTopic attribute, defined in the Apache Pulsar DeadLetterPolicy class, to be non-fully-qualified such that it will be able to find the topic and properly send the dead message. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring Web Services
The first release candidate of Spring Web Services 5.0.0 delivers bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and one new feature that aligns JUnit 6.0 as the minimal supported version. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring Vault
The first release candidate of Spring Vault 4.0.0 ships with notable dependency upgrades, namely: JDK 25; the first release candidates of Spring Framework 7.0.0 and Spring Data 2025.1.0; JUnit 6.0; and Jackson 3.0. There was one new feature that now supports the Spring Framework RestClient interface for internal authentication and for use with the VaultTemplate class. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
