Spring Boot 1.4: What's New, Release History & Support Lifecycle

What Is New in Spring Boot 1.4

Spring Boot 1.4 delivers a significant upgrade with new starters, testing enhancements, and developer tooling improvements. This release builds on the core principles of rapid application development while introducing modern best practices.

What testing enhancements were introduced?

Spring Boot 1.4 dramatically simplifies unit and integration testing with several new annotations and utilities. The new @JsonTest annotation focuses your tests specifically on JSON serialization and deserialization.

You can now easily mock and spy on beans within your application context using @MockBean and @SpyBean. This is a game-changer for testing components that rely on Spring's dependency injection.

Example: Using @MockBean

@RunWith(SpringRunner.class)
@SpringBootTest
public class MyTest {

    @MockBean
    private SomeService someService;

    @Test
    public void testMethod() {
        given(this.someService.doSomething()).willReturn("test");
        // ... rest of the test
    }
}

How did developer tooling get better?

Developer experience received a major boost with LiveReload now supporting Thymeleaf template updates without a full application restart. This makes the code-save-view feedback loop incredibly fast for UI development.

The restart mechanism is now smarter and more configurable. You can exclude specific paths from triggering a restart, which is useful for temporary files or logs. New properties like spring.devtools.restart.exclude give you fine-grained control.

What new starters and integrations are available?

This release adds first-class support for several new technologies. The new spring-boot-starter-json starter provides a coherent way to pull in Jackson and JSR-353 dependencies for modern JSON handling.

Apache Geode auto-configuration and a dedicated starter (spring-boot-starter-data-geode) are now included. You also get full auto-configuration support for Apache Tomcat 8.5 and Jersey JAX-RS implementations out of the box.

Were there any dependency upgrades?

Spring Boot 1.4 is built on the solid foundation of Spring Framework 4.3, which itself brings numerous improvements and new features. This is a mandatory upgrade that unlocks new programming models within Boot.

Hibernate 5.2 is now the default JPA provider, bringing its own set of performance and standards compliance improvements. The build tool plugins for both Gradle and Maven have also been updated with new capabilities and fixes.