Dear Spring community,

I'm pleased to announce that Spring Framework 5.0.2 and 4.3.13 are available now, as a pair of refinement releases which are recommended as immediate upgrades for all Spring users. They will also be part of the upcoming Spring Boot 2.0 M7 and 1.5.9 releases, respectively.

5.0.2 comes with significant tightening-up across the framework, including performance improvements and fine-tuned configuration variants. Many of those changes have been backported to 4.3.13 for streamlined consumption in existing applications.

Please note: Our Castor XML support is marked as deprecated now due to the inactivity of the Castor project. On a related note, we are effectively deprecating JDK 6 support in the 4.3.x line, ending our first-class efforts for it; more on this in a separate blog post.

Next up is Spring Framework 5.0.3 in late December, accompanied by a 4.3.14 release, wrapping up our core efforts for this year. Please report any issues you might experience against 5.0.2 or 4.3.13, allowing us to provide timely fixes before the end of the year still.

Cheers, Juergen