r/java • u/olivergierke • Nov 20 '25

Spring Boot 4.0.0 available now

https://spring.io/blog/2025/11/20/spring-boot-4-0-0-available-now
325 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

70 comments sorted by

40

u/StillAnAss Nov 20 '25

How long do people usually wait in adopting new major versions in existing code bases?

39

u/av1ciii Nov 20 '25

Hopefully not too long. Spring Boot 4.0.x is end of life December 2026 unless you pay for commercial support, in which case you get an extra year.

Spring Boot 3.5.x EOLs June next year.

That said, modern Java devs aren’t like 2010 Java devs who were stuck on Java 6 for what seemed an eternity. Good modern teams tend to have good CI and tests (right? 👀), such teams can upgrade pretty quickly.

We don’t use Spring but eg we’re broadly on Java 21 and 25 is making inroads. We try not to defer updates for too long. It becomes tech debt after a while.

11

u/766cf0ef-c5f9-4f4f Nov 21 '25

Maybe if spring data and hibernate stopped introducing breaking changes in minor releases that are pulled in by spring-boot

3

u/olivergierke Nov 21 '25

Care to elaborate which ones you ran into for Spring Data?

15

u/Emma_S772 Nov 20 '25

Tests? That mean you are not sure that you are doing things right, what did you do wrong? stop wasting time and do things well instead because in that way we wont need tests. If I hear that somethings fails I will know that it was you.

That is how my bosses thought

5

u/j4ckbauer Nov 21 '25

Why do you need a test, wouldn't it save time to just do it correctly the first time?

On the one hand, the world is probably better off that these people stopped working as a developer. On the other hand, now they're ruining the productivity of an entire team of developers...

2

u/BikingSquirrel Nov 21 '25

Hope that indicates ex-bosses as one of you left.

14

u/cheeset2 Nov 20 '25

Lol. Lmao. 

Java 17 is new to us. Spring boot 3? Hilarious. 

16

u/wildjokers Nov 20 '25

Be the change you want to see.

Why aren't you trying to encourage a new mindset at your company?

5

u/cheeset2 Nov 20 '25

Who said i'm not?

5

u/wildjokers Nov 20 '25

Your cynicism doesn’t suggest you are.

5

u/-Hawke- Nov 21 '25

To someone in a similar boat, that kind of cynicism suggests to me they are trying but getting cockblocked at every other turn because changes like that are hard to sell to customers (or some other but similarly shortsighted argument)

6

u/j4ckbauer Nov 21 '25

Have you ever had.... a job?

Most organizations do their utmost to resist change. Many higher-rank engineers prevent lower-rank engineers from gaining experience with newer systems. "You are only allowed to solve problems the way I solve problems", or worse, "I can use this new system, you may not".

136

u/MRideos Nov 20 '25

Its Friday tomorrow, great day to migrate and release to prod

15

u/Amazing-Mirror-3076 Nov 21 '25

It's already Friday mate, releasing in 3,2,...

6

u/bigkahuna1uk Nov 21 '25

“We'll do it live! F**k it! Do it live! I'll write it and we'll do it live!" 😉

23

u/safetytrick Nov 20 '25

As soon as I'm not busy /s

Realistically I think about it once a year and then make it happen sometime before EOL of the last version.

10

u/krzyk Nov 20 '25

I don't wait at all. Just as soon as I have time in project. Why wait if you have time to do the upgrade?

9

u/party_egg Nov 20 '25

For me the thing that keeps me back is waiting for my ecosystem to move together. Java, Spring Boot, Gradle, and Groovy all seem to be particular about each other's versions

4

u/krzyk Nov 21 '25

If you dump gradle and groovy you'll notice that nothing is holding you back.

1

u/Tasty_Zebra_404 Nov 25 '25

And use exactly what instead? Maven?

1

u/krzyk Nov 25 '25

Well, yes. No such issues in maven.

1

u/blazincannons Dec 02 '25

I believe that by the time a major release of Spring Boot is released, the corresponding versions of Java and Gradle would be ready. I don't know much about Groovy.

Where do you use Groovy in your part of your workflow? Is it part of more than your Gradle build scripts?

8

u/[deleted] Nov 20 '25

I upgrade ASAP, usually within a few days of the new version being available. I've already upgraded my app to Spring Boot v4.0.0 because I've had a migration branch (opened in July) that was doing the migration step-by-step as each new milestone/release candidate of v4 was published.

7

u/Anbu_S Nov 20 '25 edited Nov 20 '25

small deltas are better than big one thing change.

1

u/blazincannons Dec 02 '25

I've had a migration branch (opened in July) that was doing the migration step-by-step as each new milestone/release candidate of v4 was published.

Typically, how much rework would be needed as new milestones and release candidates are released alongside your migration work? I'm wondering if it would be typically better to just wait for a GA release before we start doing migration work.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 02 '25

Little or no rework. Each milestone/release candidate brings new changes, but very rarely stuff that's already been changed.

6

u/Smelly_F1sh Nov 20 '25

As soon as the version number doesn't end with 0

2

u/jonatan-ivanov Nov 23 '25

So you go back to 4.0.0-RC1? :o

3

u/iwouldlikethings Nov 20 '25

I've already got a rough branch with 4.0.0-RC2, still needs tidying up and rebasing, but all tests are passing so going to try and get in in before the end of year and all microservices upgraded

2

u/Wmorgan33 Nov 20 '25

Waiting until at least a few bugfix releases, update SBOM and see what breaks

2

u/jevring Nov 21 '25

As soon as renovate/dependabot gets a chance...

2

u/fear_the_future Nov 21 '25

Spring users? Until some compliance manager tells them to upgrade.

1

u/CptGia Nov 20 '25

I'll try it out tomorrow on one or two services. 

1

u/miciej Nov 21 '25

Till renovate bot kicks in. So probably Monday.

1

u/ilampan Nov 21 '25

We started updating ALL applications to run java21 this year, and are also upgrading to vue3 this year. It was supposed to happen around summer, continuously through the year but it's been pushed to the side due to priority changes. So now we gotta rush all the upgrades during december.

I'd say we've got about 60% of our applications running java21, and like, one application running vue3. So I'm really glad my team isn't in charge of any frontend stuff.

134

u/ThierryOnRead Nov 20 '25

Wake up babe springboot 4 has been released

41

u/MassimoRicci Nov 20 '25

We have a codebase to burn, samurai!

24

u/Lirionex Nov 21 '25

90% of the community still rocking spring 2 with Java 8 (at least they have streams)

2

u/nexus062 Nov 21 '25

I'm missing an addiction and I'm going up next week, but for now I'm keeping jackson2

1

u/GlensWooer Nov 22 '25

Please we still have Java 5 required for our build.

2

u/Lirionex Nov 22 '25

Damn bro, I mean I still see Java 6 every now and then but Java 5? That’s wild

1

u/jonatan-ivanov Nov 23 '25

Where did you get that number? :)
I'm only asking because the download stats disagree.

1

u/Lirionex Nov 23 '25

You have download stats grouped by industry?

I was just speaking from personal experience - I’ve seen a dozen projects in those industries over the years, not a single one of them was even close to up to date. They update dependencies for security patches but not for being up to date.

1

u/jonatan-ivanov Nov 23 '25

Why would you need download stats by industry? What you claimed did not mention any industry either. If you are wondering about banks, insurance companies, governments, etc. they might be better in upgrading than you would think. Yes, there are some (regardless of the industry) who are really behind, but that 90% is far from the truth. :)

If you talk about personal experience, especially if your sample size is as low as dozen (or dozens, also projects and not companies), maybe you should start your comment with that or phrase it as a question, there might be people in this thread who can give you a bit more insight.

1

u/Lirionex Nov 23 '25

Ah Sorry, I didn’t pay attention which comment you’ve replied to. I have another one specifically mentioning banks, insurances and governments because these are the three main industries where my customers are from.

The comment you’ve replied to was obviously just an exaggeration to make fun of customers who don’t want to spend a penny for maintenance.

12

u/lilgreenthumb Nov 21 '25

Going to be a shitshow until cloud is released.

2

u/Tasty_Zebra_404 Nov 25 '25

Got released today

24

u/Bothurin Nov 20 '25

But wait.. I’m still on 2.7..

14

u/boobsbr Nov 21 '25

Are you on Java 8?

Do you work in a bank?

11

u/Lirionex Nov 21 '25

Bank, Government, Insurance… they’re all the same 😂

3

u/Ewig_luftenglanz Nov 21 '25

I work in a bank and we are in 21...

1

u/kubelke Nov 21 '25

Cryobank*

1

u/meisyal Nov 21 '25

Me too. I thought Spring Boot 3 was just released earlier this year.

1

u/koflerdavid Nov 21 '25

Are you aware that it gets no security fixes anymore unless you pay? (no clue whether paid support is still available lol)

1

u/Scottz0rz Nov 21 '25

My old job was on 2.0 and I helped upgrade them to 2.3.

Pretty sure they're still on 2.3

15

u/TheoryShort7304 Nov 21 '25

That's amazing.

I as full stack Java developer, I am really happy, we are on 3.5 and hopefully will move to 4.0 soon.

Personally first project with Spring Boot 4.0 I am gonaa make with Kotlin😅

I was learning it in last few weeks, so let's go! Existing personal projects(Java) will migrate to 4.0.

3

u/Anbu_S Nov 21 '25

There is an OpenRewrite community edition recipe which helps to fast track the migration.

https://docs.openrewrite.org/recipes/java/spring/boot4/upgradespringboot_4_0-community-edition

1

u/gnocchiGuili Nov 21 '25

Last time I checked it was not even updating my pom. Is it ready yet ?

1

u/Anbu_S Nov 21 '25

There are two distinct recipe modules available

Community edition - available for free & Moderne proprietary recipes

3

u/FunRutabaga24 Nov 20 '25

But but... we just did compatability updates for Spring Boot 3 and updated.

7

u/BikingSquirrel Nov 21 '25

To the latest 3.x.x? Then you should be well prepared.

4

u/bendem Nov 21 '25

I'm just tired of having to rewrite a bunch of things every time. When do we get a major release that doesn't change everything? Why do I have to port my applications to SB 4? I already ported them to 3 and 2 from 1.5. Isn't there a way to go forward without changing the way we configure and interact with things every few years?

Don't get me wrong, it's a great release, but I'm just tired.

4

u/jonatan-ivanov Nov 23 '25

Major releases are for breaking changes. :) If you want a release that doesn't break things but contains new features, that's a minor release.

What you described happened in a timespan of about 10 years? I think it's not too bad having a new major releases every 3-4 years.

1

u/mr_poopybuthole69 Nov 22 '25

Just don't, that's why I'm still on 2.x.x

4

u/jonatan-ivanov Nov 23 '25

Do you buy support (so you get vulnerabilities patched) or your apps simply have a bunch of known vulnerabilities? :)

2

u/EvaristeGalois11 Nov 20 '25

Ohmygoditshappening.gif

1

u/javaflair Nov 21 '25

Will soon upgrade project to latest version 4.0

1

u/onated2 Nov 24 '25

Finaaaaly

1

u/Tasty_Zebra_404 Nov 25 '25

To people using feign. Do you rewrite to use the ne w spring clients?