What’s Coming in Spring Framework 6.0? Roadmap, Features, and Release Timeline

The annual SpringOne conference was held online on September 1‑2 due to the pandemic. Pivotal, the steward of the Spring project, gathered thousands of developers, customers, and partners to share technical practices and reveal major upcoming moves, with Spring Framework 6.0 as the headline.

Spring Framework 5.3.x

Spring Framework 5.3.x plans were outlined, emphasizing that Spring Boot 2.6 and 2.7 are based on this version.

Spring Framework 6.0

Spring 6.0, the highly anticipated release, will be built on Java 17 and Jakarta EE 9. Its current status is:

Spring 6.0 marks the start of a new decade for the framework. Planned milestones include:

Development branch to be fixed by the end of September.

Milestone release by the end of 2021.

Release candidate (RC) version in mid‑2022.

Final release date not yet set, possibly following Spring Boot’s half‑year cadence.

A major update with many new features.

Final version features that will interest developers.

Spring Framework 6.0 Roadmap

The official roadmap shows a concrete timeline for Spring 6.0 releases.

Key Changes from 5.3 to 6.0

Major breaking and migration points include:

XML configuration is likely to become obsolete.

Several Java EE APIs (EJB, JCA, JAX‑WS) will be deprecated.

RPC support such as HTTP Invoker will be removed.

Migration to Jakarta EE 9+ involves:

jakarta.servlet

(related to Tomcat 10, Jetty 11).

jakarta.persistence

(potentially Hibernate ORM 6).

Cloud‑native improvements include enhanced support for GraalVM and Project Leyden (a Java static graph project).

Spring Boot 3.0

Spring Boot 3 is built on Spring Framework 6 and will fully embrace a cloud‑native path.

The official release of Spring Boot 3 is expected in the fourth quarter of 2022.

Java 17 on the Horizon

Java 17 is slated for release next week, ushering in a new era for Spring development.