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Spring Boot 1.2 Release Notes

Phil Webb edited this page Mar 17, 2015 · 12 revisions

Spring Boot 1.2 Release Notes

Upgrading from Spring Boot 1.1

Servlet 3.1, Tomcat 8 and Jetty 9

Spring Boot now uses Tomcat 8 and Jetty 9 as embedded servlet containers. This provides Servlet 3.1 and enhanced WebSocket support out of the box. You can still use Tomcat 7 or Jetty 8 if you prefer to stick to an older version. See the spring-boot-sample-tomcat7-jsp and spring-boot-sample-jetty8 samples for downgrade examples.

Logging output

The default logging configuration has been updated with Spring Boot 1.2 to no longer write log files. If you want file output, you can use the logging.path or logging.file properties. You can still also completely customize logging by adding your own logback.xml file.

Consistent HTTP URI/body decoding

A CharacterEncodingFilter is now registered automatically for consistent URI/body decoding. You can use the spring.http.encoding.charset property if you need something other than UTF-8 or set spring.http.encoding.enabled to false if you don’t want the CharacterEncodingFilter registered at all.

IgnoreDefaultModelOnRedirect with Spring MVC

Spring MVC auto-configuration now sets the ignoreDefaultModelOnRedirect property of RequestMappingHandlerAdapter to true by default. If you need model attributes to be part of your redirect URLs you can add the following to your application.properties:

spring.mvc.ignore-default-model-on-redirect=false

Jackson defaults

The auto-configured Jackson ObjectMapper now has MapperFeature.DEFAULT_VIEW_INCLUSION and DeserializationFeature.FAIL_ON_UNKNOWN_PROPERTIES disabled. If you need to revert to the previous settings you can add the following to your application.properties:

spring.jackson.mapper.default-view-inclusion=true
spring.jackson.deserialization.fail-on-unknown-properties=true

Mongo and MongoDbFactory Beans

The MongoAutoConfiguration class will no longer register a Mongo bean if you define your own MongoDbFactory bean. Ensure that you either register a Mongo bean whenever you declare your own MongoDbFactory bean, or that you only use the MongoDbFactory interface to access Mongo databases.

Moved health.* properties to management.health.*

Health-related configuration keys have been moved from health to management.health for consistency with other management-related properties.

Renamed VanillaHealthIndicator class

The VanillaHealthIndicator class has been renamed to ApplicationHealthIndicator. Most users will not interact with the class directly, however, if you previously imported org.springframework.boot.actuate.health.VanillaHealthIndicator in your code you will need to change it to org.springframework.boot.actuate.health.ApplicationHealthIndicator.

Hibernate

The SpringNamingStrategy class has been moved to the org.springframework.boot.orm.jpa.hibernate package. The old org.springframework.boot.orm.jpa.SpringNamingStrategy remains but is deprecated and will be removed in a future release.

Managed dependencies are now provided for hibernate-envers, hibernate-jpamodelgen and hibernate-ehcache.

PersistenceExceptionTranslationPostProcessor

A PersistenceExceptionTranslationPostProcessor will now be registered by default. If you don’t want exception translation set the spring.dao.exceptiontranslation.enabled property to false.

Health JSON

The /health actuator endpoint JSON has been slightly modified when only a single HealthIndicator is involved. You might need to update any monitoring tools if you previously queried a specific JSON path.

Anonymous health access restrictions

The /health actuator endpoint now restricts anonymous access. When accessed anonymously the endpoint hides the health details and simply indicates if the server is UP or DOWN. It also caches the response for the period specified by endpoints.health.time-to-live. These restrictions can be disabled, thereby restoring 1.1.x’s behavior, by setting endpoints.health.sensitive to false.

Spring 4.1

Spring Boot 1.2 requires Spring Framework 4.1.5 or later and is not compatible with Spring Framework 4.0.

Hikari CP

The version of com.zaxxer:HikariCP that’s provide by Boot’s dependency management now requires Java 8. If you’re running on Java 6 or Java 7 you should update your dependency to use com.zaxxer:HikariCP-java6 instead.

Configuration Properties

The property spring.data.mongo.repositories.enabled has been renamed to spring.data.mongodb.repositories.enabled.

Deprecations

  • The org.springframework.boot.actuate.system.ApplicationPidListener class has been superseded by ApplicationPidFileWriter

  • The CLI @EnableRabbitMessaging annotation has been superseded by @EnableRabbit from the spring-rabbit project.

  • The http.mappers. properties are deprecated in favor of their spring.jackson.serialization. equivalents.

  • org.springframework.boot.json.SimpleJsonParser has been deprecated in favor of BasicJsonParser to avoid confusion with the ``JSON Simple'' library.

New and Noteworthy

Version Updates

Spring Boot 1.2 builds on and requires Spring Framework 4.1. Several 3rd party dependencies have been upgraded with this release including Jackson, Joda Time and Hibernate Validator. Tomcat 8 and Jetty 9 are now the default embedded servlet containers (providing Servlet 3.1 support).

@SpringBootApplication annotation

A new @SpringBootApplication convenience annotation has been added which is equivalent to @Configuration + @EnableAutoConfiguration + @ComponentScan. If you find you use frequently use those three annotations, you might want to consider swapping.

JTA Support

Spring Boot 1.2 now supports distributed JTA transactions across multiple XA resources using either an Atomkos or Bitronix embedded transaction manager. JTA transactions are also supported when deploying to a suitable Java EE Application Server.

When a JTA environment is detected, Spring’s JtaTransactionManager will be used to manage transactions. Auto-configured JMS, DataSource and JPA beans will be upgraded to support XA transactions. You can use standard Spring idioms such as @Transactional to participate in a distributed transaction.

Additionally, general support classes are provided to make Atomkos and Bitronix easier to configure, even if you are not using @EnableAutoConfiguration. See the JTA section of the reference manual for details.

JNDI Lookups

If you are using a full Java EE Application Server you can now lookup both DataSource and JMS ConnectionFactory beans from JNDI. Use the spring.datasource.jndi-name and spring.jms.jndi-name properties in your application.properties or application.yml file.

Jackson customization

It is now possible to customize the Jackson ObjectMapper using spring.jackson properties. Jackson’s SerializationFeature, DeserializationFeature, MapperFeature, JsonParser.Feature and JsonGenerator.Feature objects can be customized using serialization, deserialization, mapper, parser and generator properties. For example to enable DeserializationFeature.FAIL_ON_UNKNOWN_PROPERTIES you could add the following to your application.properties:

spring.jackson.deserialization.fail-on-unknown-properties=true

Additionally spring.jackson.date-format and spring.jackson.property-naming-strategy properties have also been added with Spring Boot 1.2.

Banner Interface

A new Banner interface has been added which can be used in combination with SpringApplication.setBanner(…​) to provide customized banner output. The use of src/main/resources/banner.txt is still recommended for simple banners, however, the new interface is useful if you need to do something fancy.

Banner Properties

You can now use ${application.version}, ${spring-boot.version}, ${application.formatted-version} and ${spring-boot.formatted-version} variables in your src/main/resources/banner.txt file to print your application version and/or the version of Spring Boot. The formatted-version is enclosed in brackets and includes a v prefix, for example, (v1.2.0.RELEASE).

JMS Support

Auto-configuration is now provided for Spring Framework 4.1’s @JmsListener annotation. The @EnableJms annotation is also auto-configured whenever you have spring-jms.jar on your classpath.

AMQP Support

Similarly, auto-configuration is now provided for Spring AMQP 1.4’s @RabbitListener annotation. The @EnableRabbit annotation is also auto-configured whenever you have spring-rabbit.jar on your classpath. The existing Rabbit auto-configuration has also been extended to automatically create a RabbitMessagingTemplate.

Spring Cloud Connectors

Auto-configuration has been added for spring-cloud-connectors and a new spring-boot-starter-cloud-connectors POM has also been included with this release. Auto-configuration provides equivalent functionality to the @CloudScan annotation.

Email Support

A new spring-boot-starter-mail `starter POM'' has been added along with auto-configuration support. You can inject a `JavaMailSender bean into your services to send emails. The spring.mail.* properties can be used to customize items such as the SMTP host.

Undertow Embedded Servlet Container

In addition to Tomcat and Jetty, Spring Boot now supports Undertow as an embedded Servlet container. See the reference documentation for details of how to switch.

CLI Updates

Creating a new project

The spring CLI command line tool includes a new init option which can be used to create a project from start.spring.io. For example, to create a new web application you can type:

$ spring init -d=web myapp.zip

CLI extensions

CLI extensions can now be installed and uninstalled using the CLI itself. The spring install <maven coordinates> will grab a remote jar and install it into the CLI. spring uninstall can be used to remove a previously installed extension.

Other CLI changes

The CLI now detects and support Spring’s @Cacheable annotation.

Declarative SSL with Jetty and Tomcat

SSL can now be configured declaratively by setting the various server.ssl.* properties. Support is provided for both Tomcat and Jetty. See the reference documentation for more details.

Actuator Endpoints

A global endpoints.enabled property has been added to configure if endpoints should be enabled or disabled by default. This allows you to witch from the current opt-out'' model to an opt-in'' model. For example, to disable all endpoints except health you can use the following application.properties:

endpoints.enabled=false
endpoints.health.enabled=true

Metrics

System metrics

System metrics are now provided for heap, thread, class and GC information.

DataSource metrics

DataSource pool metrics are now exposed via the /metrics actuator endpoint. The number of active connections and pool usage details are exposed for Tomcat, Hikari and Commons DBCP connection pools.

Tomcat session metrics

If you are using Tomcat as your embedded servlet container metrics are now exposed for the number of active and maximum sessions.

Dropwizard metrics

Items from Dropwizard’s MetricRegistry are now automatically exposed via the /metrics endpoint. Gauges and Counters are reflected as a single value. Timers, Meters and Histograms are expanded into sets of metrics containing all the properties of type Number.

Health indicators

JSON format

The /health actuator endpoint now returns consistent JSON regardless of the number of HealthIndicators actually involved. This makes it much easier to query the JSON for a specific item.

DataSourceHealthIndicator

DataSourceHealthIndicator now uses the spring.datasource.validation-query property (if it has been set) to check the health of the database.

DiskSpaceHealthIndicator

Free disk space is now reported as part or the /health indicator and will be used trigger a DOWN status if it drops below a certain threshold (by default 10Mb). The health.diskspace.path and health.diskspace.threshold properties can be used to customize the indicator.

Conditions

The @ConditionalOnProperty annotation has been updated with new havingValue and matchIfMissing attributes. You can now use the condition to create much more complex property matching conditions. A new AnyNestedCondition class has also been added which can be used to compose other @Conditions. Finally, the @ConditionalOnBean annotation now supports types declared as a String attribute as well as a Class.

GSON Support

It is now possible to use GSON instead of Jackson to create JSON output. Jackson remains the default and recommended choice. If you use GSON you should exclude Jackson libraries from your Maven/Gradle build unless your are using Spring Boot’s Actuator which requires Jackson. As of Spring Boot 1.2.2, if both Gson and Jackson are on the classpath, you can configure your application to use Gson by setting spring.http.converters.preferred-json-mapper to gson.

EmbeddedServerPortWriter

The spring-actuator project includes a new org.springframework.boot.actuate.system.EmbeddedServerPortFileWriter class which can be used to write the port number of the embedded server to file when the application starts up.

Log4j2

Log4J is now supported as an alternative logging system and spring-boot-starter-log4j2 start POM is provided. Logback remains the default and recommended logging system.

Jersey auto-configuration

Auto-configuration support is now provided for Jersey. Refer to reference documentation for details.

Apache-Commons DBCP2 Support

The Apache commons-dbcp2 database connection pool library is now supported in addition to Tomcat, Hikari and DBCP (v1).

Maven Plugin

The repackage task of the spring-boot-maven-plugin can now be disabled. This can be useful if you want to use spring-boot:run but you don’t need ``Fat Jars''.

Configuration meta-data

The spring-boot, spring-boot-autoconfigure and spring-boot-actuator jars now include additional meta-data files which can be used by tools developers to provide `code completion'' support in `application.properties files. An annotation processor is also provided to allow you to generate your own files automatically from @ConfigurationProperties classes.

Miscellaneous

The following miscellaneous updates are also include with Spring Boot 1.2:

  • The RedisProperties class now includes a database field.

  • The RelaxedDataBinder class supports alais properties.

  • Regex expressions can now be used with all keystosanitize properties.

  • AnsiOutput can now be configured using spring.output.ansi.enabled property.

  • You can now put favicon.ico files in /public, /static, /resources folders (next to other static web assets).

  • The location of the file written by ApplicationPidFileWriter (previously ApplicationPidListener) can now be specified using a spring.pidfile property or a PIDFILE environment variable.

  • Tomcat DataSource information is now automatically exposed via JMX.

  • SpringBootServletInitializer subclasses annotated with @Configuration no longer need to override the .configure method to register themselves a source.

  • If you’re so inclined, you can now use XML as an application properties format.

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