Hi, Spring fans! And happy Spring Boot 3.4 release to those who celebrate!

I know, I know what you're thinking: Josh, Spring Boot 3.4 already shipped! I know it. Spring Boot 3.4 dropped a week earlier this year! In the last couple of years, we’ve released Spring Boot on the same day as Thanksgiving Day in the USA, which is tedious for us here in the United States because it requires more preparation. This year, it’s a week early! Why do I mention this? Well, I’ve had some time already - before Thanksgiving, even - to explore the fantastic possibilities unlocked by using Spring Boot 3.4. While I've also played with it plenty over the last six months, it was super satisfying to go to the Spring Initializr, add a few dependencies, and get a working build with no modifications required to work with the versions of the dependencies. It all just comes together so nicely! There are a ton of features, it's just absolutely brimming with them. It's stuffed, you might say, like that turkey I'll be eating in a few short days!

Spring Boot delivers value on its own, of course, but it’s also the premier vehicle by which to consume the rest of the Spring portfolio. As always, this release includes dependency updates, fixes for CVEs, and tons of new features. And there’s an implied support timeline. Did you know that we only support open-source releases of Spring Boot for about a year? So, if you’re using Spring Boot 3.2, you need to upgrade to Spring Boot 3.3 because 3.2 is now out of open-source support. If you want to know where you stand, please check each project’s support pages

We’re in the waning days of the Spring Boot 3.x and Spring Framework 6.x generation. But sometime next year, we’ll see Spring Boot 4.x and Spring Framework 7.x! So make sure you’re staying upgraded and handling whatever deprecations result.

When you upgrade to a new version of Spring Boot, you get all the work the entire Spring team has done over the last six months. It’s a massive undertaking and integration, and we do it for you like clockwork every six months. I don't foolishly hope to give you a sense of all the new and novel features. I can’t. It would take the next six months to chronicle this release effectively. So, instead, I’m going to take a different tack, looking at some of the high-level features and focusing, perhaps, on one or two of them across some (but still not all!) of the new released projects in Spring Boot 3.4.

OK? OK. Let’s dive right into it. We’ll work our way through the stack starting at the level of Spring Framework, on top of which absolutely everything else builds, and then ultimately getting to projects like Spring Modulith and Spring AI, which build on top of Spring Boot.

Here are all the installments:

• Spring Framework
• Spring Data
• Spring Batch
• Spring Integration
• Spring Security
• Spring Boot
• Spring Modulith
• Spring AI

Spring AI