Stable Spring version release

Question

Right now I am trying to research on how stable Spring release are right now. I'm having problems determining whether the most current Spring release (3.1.1) is the best choice for a base architecture. Are there any differences between 3.0 and 3.1? If so are there any impact in terms of coding structure just like migrating from spring 2.0 to 3.0. Currently we have a base architecture for Spring 2.0 and we are thinking of migrating to 3.X for integrated AJAX support and integrated REST support as well. Are there any other perks in migrating to 3.X? Is it good idea to migrate to Spring 3.0? If yes are there any drawbacks in migrating also which version is the best to migrate to? Thanks for taking time in reading this, have a nice day.

Answer 1

Yes, there are some minor differences between Spring 3.0 and 3.1, some of them are well documented through the book Pro Spring 3, basically the JPA support has been improved with helper features like the spring-data project, the support of some standard compliant Java EE annotations and the possibility to create beans "profiles" inside your xml configuration that can be handy when used alongside with maven, among others features.

Migrating from 2.0 to 3.x shouldn't be problematic if you stick to the old xml based configuration

Answer 2

Are there any differences between 3.0 and 3.1?

http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.1.x/changelog.txt

EDIT: ok, it that's too technical, try this:

http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.1.x/spring-framework-reference/html/new-in-3.1.html

EDIT 2: no, you do not have to use annotations. That's just a convenience feature mostly.

EDIT 3: in Implementing Controllers all annotation based configurations have their XML-schema based counterparts. That said, unless you have very good reasons against annotations, you might try to gradually switch to this paradigm, as it is easier to read thus easier to maintain. (at least in in my opinion)

Answer 3

I've migrated some projects from spring 2.5.6 to spring-3.1 without any major problems. I can't speak to spring-3.1.1, but if its a non-milestone release I would be comfortable upgrading myself.

Here's a link to spring-3.1 features: http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.1.0.M2/spring-framework-reference/html/new-in-3.1.html

If you're moving up from 2.x to 3.x I don't see any reason why you would NOT upgrade to 3.1, even if you don't see immediate use for 3.1 features.