Dear Spring community,

Spring Framework 4.2 is not going GA today quite yet, but it's almost there: RC3 is available from repo.spring.io now, as a last release candidate before we reach GA on the 30th of July. This release includes 50 fixes and improvements over RC2, waiting for you to try them!

We decided to do another release candidate for several reasons: e.g. our continued wait for Jackson 2.6 final and Hibernate ORM 5.0 final but also our recent build upgrade to Gradle 2.5 and some last-minute refinements within our 4.2 web story (based on RC1/RC2 feedback).

I'm pleased to announce that this is in fact the first release of Spring which builds fine not only on JDK 8 but also on current JDK 9 snapshots! Our master build script is capable of running in both environments, so simply update your JAVA_HOME and trigger the framework build...

Note that Spring Framework 4.2 is runtime-compatible with Java 6, 7, 8 (including the upcoming 8u60) and early 9 (JDK 9 build 72) at this point, using the very same standard framework jars. However, for executing the framework build, you'll have to use JDK 8 or 9.

Next stop: 4.2 GA on July 30, 2015! The countdown has started already...

Cheers, Juergen