Migrating to Spring Framework 5.x

Note that the 5.x generation is currently in the Milestone phase; please check out the Roadmap page on JIRA for more details on upcoming versions.

Migrating to Spring Framework 5.0

For a general overview of new features, refer to What's New in the Spring Framework.

Baseline update

Spring Framework 5.0 requires Java SE 8 or above, since its entire codebase is now based on Java 8 source code level. The project offers full compatibility with JDK 9 as of July 2016.

Java EE 7 API level is required in Spring's corresponding modules now:

Servlet 3.1 (Servlet 2.5 runtime compatibility has been dropped)
JMS 2.0
JPA 2.1
Bean Validation 1.1

Servers

Tomcat 8.5+
Jetty 9.3+
WildFly 10+
with the addition of Netty 4.1 and Undertow 1.4 for the Web Reactive module

Removed Packages, Classes and Methods

Package mock.staticmock removed from spring-aspects module.
- No support for AnnotationDrivenStaticEntityMockingControl anymore.
Packages web.view.tiles2 and orm.hibernate3/hibernate4 dropped.
- Minimum requirement: Tiles 3 and Hibernate 5 now.
Many deprecated classes and methods removed across the codebase.
- A few compromises made for commonly used methods in the ecosystem.

Dropped support

The Spring Framework no longer supports: Portlet, Velocity, JasperReports, XMLBeans, JDO, Guava (replaced by the Caffeine support). If those are critical to your project, you should stay on Spring Framework 4.3.x (supported until 2019).