Spring Boot 4 & Spring Framework 7 – What’s New

Spring Boot 4 and Spring Framework 7 introduce significant modernization updates including Java 17 baseline with Java 21/25 support, Jakarta EE 11 alignment, and Kotlin 2.2+ compatibility. Key features include enhanced GraalVM native image support, built-in API versioning, declarative HTTP clients with @HttpServiceClient, resilience annotations for retry logic, improved observability with Micrometer 2 and OpenTelemetry, modular architecture for better performance, and JSpecify null safety adoption. The releases also bring testing improvements with context pausing and RestTestClient, while removing deprecated javax.* packages and Jackson 2.x support.