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) 

Websocket examples

Websocket examples using

• JSR 356 (part of Java EE7)
• Spring Boot
• Apache Spark microservices framework

Spring Web Flow and Spring Boot DevTools problem: SpelEvaluationException: EL1004E: Method call:cannot be found

When calling a method with arguments using the <evaluate>  tag in a spring webflow XML definition I get the error SpelEvaluationException: EL1004E: Method call: xxx cannot be found.
I am using Spring Boot Devtools for automatic server restart upon changes.
The embedded LiveReload server uses two classloaders, and thinks the the classes of the parameters supplied by spel in the XML are different from the (same) classes in your Java code.
Hence the method is not found, and an exception is thrown.
Possible Solutions:

• Do not use Spring Boot Devtools for Spring Web Flow projects
• Follow the guidance in the description of the bug