Dear Spring community,

It is my pleasure to announce that a feature-complete Spring Framework 5.0 release candidate is available now! We are expecting a further release candidate at the end of May and a final release in late June at this point.

As a major revision of the core framework, 5.0 RC1 comes with a Java 8+ baseline and many infrastructure refinements: e.g. our own Commons Logging bridge autodetecting Log4j 2, SLF4J, JUL by default; streamlined use of Servlet 3.1+; and early support for JUnit 5.0 M4.

Once again, here are the major Spring Framework 5 feature themes:

• Reactive programming: introducing our Spring WebFlux framework built on Reactor 3.1, with support for RxJava 1.3 & 2.1 and running on Tomcat, Jetty, Netty or Undertow.
• Functional style with Java 8 & Kotlin: several API refinements and Kotlin extensions across the framework, in particular for bean registration and functional web endpoints.
• Integration with Java EE 8 APIs: support for Servlet 4.0, Bean Validation 2.0, JPA 2.2, as well as the JSON Binding API (as an alternative to Jackson/Gson in Spring MVC).
• Ready for JDK 9: fully aligned with JDK 9 at runtime, on the classpath as well as the module path (on the latter: as filename-based "automatic modules" for the time being).
• And of course, many further refinements across the framework: check out our updated What's New page for a comprehensive overview of changes since 4.3.

Cheers, Juergen

P.S.: For some background on Spring 5's reactive programming story with Project Reactor and its Reactive Streams foundation, I highly recommend Rossen's recent InfoQ podcast.

Also, stay tuned for the first Spring Boot 2.0 milestone, due early next week, building on Spring Framework 5.0 RC1 and a couple of portfolio releases to happen in the meantime...