Spring Boot v1.4.0.M2 is available now from the Spring milestone repository. This is an absolutely massive release, closing over 180 issues and pull requests! Thanks to everyone that has contributed.

Highlights of the new release include:

• ASCII Art banners generated from image files (gif,jpg or png).
• Easier JsonSerializer and JsonDeserializer registration with @JsonComponent.
• Couchbase support.
• Neo4J support
• Narayana transaction manager support.
• Upgrades to Spring Framework 4.3, Hibernate 5.1, Jackson 2.7, Solr 5.5, Spring Data Hopper, Spring Session 1.2 & Hazelcast 3.6.
• A massive overhaul of testing support including a new unified @SpringBootTest annotation, @MockBean and @SpyBean support, JSON AssertJ support and auto-configuration for tests.

For a complete list of changes, and upgrade instructions, see the Spring Boot 1.4 Release Notes on the WIKI and the updated reference documentation. Watch out for a series of upcoming blog posts about some of the new features in 1.4.

As always, early feedback and bug reports are extremely valuable to us and very welcome.