Spring boot 4 / framework 7 released (updated)

Spring boot 4 was released this week, on the heels of the Spring Framework 7 release. Here are some highlights:

• Upgrades in underlying technology:

• Java 25 (with a Java 17 baseline)
• Gradle 9
• Jackson 3 
• plenty of major releases for Spring modules (Data, AMQP, Batch, BraphQL, HATEOAS, Rest Docs, Security...)

• Completion of the effort to add JSpecify null safety throughout the codebase 
• OpenFeign like support for declarative HTTP Service clients based on annotated interfaces for RestClient, RestTemplate and WebClient.
• Autowired RestTestClient (operating on the underlying MockMvc instance) 
• REST API Versioning
• new JMS Client API 
• Kotlin Serialisation (<-> JSON)