Spring Batch has historically followed Spring Framework’s baselines for both java version and third party dependencies. With Spring Batch 4, the Spring Framework version is being upgraded to Spring Framework 5. As a result, the Java version requirement for Spring Batch is also increasing to Java 8. This should be mainly an internal change, in that most of the framework has supported things like functional interfaces and lambdas since they were released.

In order to continue to integrate with supported versions of the third party libraries Spring Batch uses, Spring Batch 4 is updating the dependencies across the board. The new dependency versions align with Spring Framework 5.

Spring Batch 4 is providing a collection of builders for all of the ItemReader implementations and ItemWriter implementations that come with the framework. As of this release, builders for the following components (as well as some related utility builders) are available:

Before Spring Batch 4, the default serialization mechanism for the ExecutionContext was based on the XStream library. In this release, the serialization mechanism has been changed to use Jackson by default.

The new serialization format is not compatible with the old serialization format. The old serialization mechanism based on XStreamExecutionContextStringSerializer is still available but is now deprecated and will be removed in a future version. If the old format needs to be used with Spring Batch 4, it should be configured by implementing a BatchConfigurer and overriding the configuration in the JobRepositoryFactoryBean and JobExplorerFactoryBean.