News

Spring Boot 1.2.1 Released

• By John K. Waters
• January 27, 2015

Pivotal Software has announced the availability of a Spring Boot 1.2.1, a maintenance update featuring more than 70 bug fixes and a handful of enhancements.

Spring Boot co-creator Phil Webb made the announcement on the Spring blog. A list of the fixes is available on the GitHub Spring Projects page here.

This update comes less than a month after the release of Spring Boot 1.2.0 and is available now on the Maven Central and repo.spring.io repositories.

Unveiled early last year, Spring Boot is a rapid application development framework is designed to be "a radically faster and widely accessible" means of getting started with Spring development, according to the company. It's designed make it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring-based applications that run with little Spring configuration. Also, Spring Boot is "opinionated" out of the box, so it encourages specific practices to increase ease of development, Pivotal says.

"Spring Boot brings a coding approach that you might associate more with single purpose frameworks or dynamic languages that almost eliminates boilerplate code and configuration work," Pieter Humphrey, consulting product marketing manager at Pivotal, explained in an earlier interview. "Historically Java developers have to spend a fair amount of time...setting up a servlet environment or a server or whatever. Spring Boot takes an opinionated approach and makes a lot of assumptions that get developers coding quickly with something that they can override later. The idea is to get them off and running very quickly."

Spring Boot 1.2.0, released in December, added a significant number of new features and improvements, including the ability to use the JMS support enhancements in Spring 4.1. That release also came with support for JTA transactions across multiple XA resources using an Atomikos or Bitronix embedded transaction manager. With that release, Spring Boot also began using Servlet 3.1 when running with an embedded servlet container, and Tomcat 8, Jetty 9 and Undertow 1.1 all became supported options.

The Spring Boot project grew out of a community request (SPR 9888) to improve containerless Web application architectures. Pivotal, which is an EMC spinoff that took over the Spring products line, announced Spring Boot in 2013 as part of a larger plan to create the Spring IO platform, which would provide a kind of Eclipse Release Train model for annual, synchronized releases of all Spring projects.