News

Spring Boot 2.0 Released

• By John K. Waters
• March 28, 2018

There has been so much headline-grabbing Java news lately -- the release of Java SE 10, the renaming of enterprise Java to Jakarta EE, and yesterday's news about Oracle v. Google -- you might have missed Pivotal Software's release of Spring Boot 2. (Heck, you might have missed the start of actual spring.)

Spring Boot is a rapid application development framework designed to simplify the development of stand-alone, production-grade, Spring-framework-based apps that run with little Spring configuration. Spring Boot is "opinionated" out of the box, so it encourages specific practices to increase ease of development.

Spring Boot 2.0 is the first major revision since Spring 1.0, which was released almost four years ago. This release is the result of "17 months' work and over 6,800 commits by 215 different individuals," said Spring Framework committer Phil Webb in a blog post. Also, it's the first GA version of Spring Boot to provide support for Spring Framework 5.0, released last September.

The list of new Spring Boot features in this release that Webb highlighted in his post includes:

• A Java 8 baseline, and Java 9 support
• Reactive Web programming support with Spring WebFlux/WebFlux.fn
• Auto-configuration and starter POMs for reactive Spring Data Cassandra, MongoDB, Couchbase and Redis
• Support for embedded Netty
• HTTP/2 for Tomcat, Undertow and Jetty
• Kotlin support
• A brand-new actuator architecture, with support for Spring MVC, WebFlux and Jersey
• Micrometer based metrics with exporters for Atlas, Datadog, Ganglia, Graphite, Influx, JMX, New Relic, Prometheus, SignalFx, StatsD and Wavefront
• Quartz scheduler support
• Greatly simplified security auto-configuration

There's a much longer and more detailed list of features available on the Pivotal launch page. There's also a migration guide available online for those upgrading an existing Spring Boot application, as well as support for bootstrapping a new project on the spring.io site.

The company is planning to publish more blog posts on the new features in Spring Boot 2.0, Webb noted. Also, there's a recording of an introductory webinar held on March 13 that provides a deep dive into the new release.

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 product 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.

The Spring Framework is one of the most popular Java application frameworks on the market today. It's a layered Java/J2EE framework based on code published in Rod Johnson's book "Expert One-on-One Java EE Design and Development" (Wrox Press, October 2002). He also wrote the first version of the framework.