What’s New In Spring Boot 3.0?

One of the great news for Java developers is that, Spring Boot 3.0 is officially released in November, 2022. It has some new features and improvements. Spring Boot 3.0 is also the first major release of Spring Boot after a long duration. The previous version Spring Boot 2.0 was released around 4.5 years ago. Additionally, Spring Boot 3.0 becomes the first Spring Boot GA release which will support Spring Framework 6.0. For the developers who are working on Spring Boot projects or going to work in future as well, it becomes mandatory to know about these updates in order to have better hold on Spring Boot.

Below are the list of highlights in the release of Spring Boot 3.0.

• JDK 17 becomes minimum JDK to work with Spring Boot 3.0
• Inclusion of Jakarta EE in place of Java EE libraries
• Support for generating native images using GraalVM
• Improved observability with Micrometer and Micrometer Tracing

What’s Important To Know for Spring Boot Developers?

1. Spring Boot 3.0 builds on top of Spring Framework 6. Therefore, if you are working on Spring Boot version 3.0, it will automatically download the required dependencies of Spring framework 6. In other words, by default, you will be using Spring Framework 6 while working with Spring Boot 3.0.
2. Before getting Spring Boot 3.0 in your project, first get JDK 17 or later versions of JDK in your system. Why?, Because Spring Boot 3.0 requires JDK 17 as a minimum version to work with it. Furthermore, official release documentation of Spring Boot 3.0 confirms that it has been tested with JDK 19 also and works well with it.
3. As Java EE has already been changed to Jakarta EE, all dependencies of Java EE APIs has also migrated to Jakarta EE APIs in Spring Boot 3.0. Hence, the package names starting with ‘javax’ need to be changed to ‘Jakarta’ accordingly. For example, ‘javax.servlet.*’ is changed to ‘jakarta.servlet.*’ now. Apart from that, there are upgrades in multiple number of other third-party libraries as well.
4. GraalVM Native Images provide a new way to deploy and run Java applications. Compared to the Java Virtual Machine, native images can run with a smaller memory footprint and with much faster startup times.

What’s next?

You might be curious to know more about it and in detail. If yes, you may visit a detailed article on ‘New Features In Spring Boot 3 And Spring 6’.

Additionally, you may also be looking for an example which is completely developed using Spring Boot 3.0. For that, you may visit ‘Spring Security UserDetailsService Using Spring Boot 3.0’.

This is not the end. You will get updates on other features as well once developers start using it and the Spring Boot 3.0 moves a step in getting the maturity level.