Dear Spring community,

I’m pleased to announce that a number of Spring Integration 4.x.x (4.3.1, 4.2.9, 4.1.9, 4.0.9) maintenance versions have been released. It’s strongly recommended for everyone to upgrade because these releases contain some important bug fixes and improvements.

We do not anticipate releasing more versions of the for 4.1.x and 4.0.x branches. If you use these in your projects, consider upgrading to 4.3.x as soon as possible.

While you can find all the changes for 4.3.1 in its Release Notes, here are some highlights:

• It is a foundation for upcoming Spring Boot 1.4 GA;

• Routers can now resolve channelKey as a Class<?> correctly. Previously such a configuration produced the following exception:

MessagingException: unsupported return type for router [class java.lang.Class];

• Messaging Gateway now supports Message<?> as return type for "receive-only" methods:

  @Gateway(replyChannel="ingestMessages") Message getMessage();

Previously such a configuration produced the following exception:

ClassCastException: java.lang.String cannot be cast to org.springframework.messaging.Message

• Channel auto-creating and late binding improvements;

• IdempotentReceiverInterceptor (as well as any HandleMessageAdvice) can now be configured as a part of <request-handler-advice-chain>, although it is applied to the MessageHandler.handleMessage() method;

• And special thanks to good Dr. Syer for his valuable contribution, as usual. This time it was a new feature with LockRegistryLeaderInitiator to control leadership in your clustered application using Spring Integration distributed LockRegistry implementation, e.g. JdbcLockRegistry.

Next up: Spring Integration 5.0, based on Spring Framework 5.0 and some Reactive Streams support. Don’t miss SpringOne Platform conference the next week in Las Vegas to hear from us about all the new features and future plans!

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