This section shows the major highlights of Spring Batch 5 and is not an exhaustive list of changes. For more details, please refer to the migration guide.
What’s New in Spring Batch 5.0
Spring Batch 5.0 has the following major themes:
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Java 17 Requirement
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Dependencies Re-baseline
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Batch infrastructure configuration updates
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New features
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Pruning
Java 17 Requirement
Spring Batch follows Spring Framework’s baselines for both Java version and third party dependencies. With Spring Batch 5, the Spring Framework version is being upgraded to Spring Framework 6, which requires Java 17. As a result, the Java version requirement for Spring Batch is also increasing to Java 17.
Dependencies Re-baseline
To continue the integration with supported versions of the third party libraries that Spring Batch uses, Spring Batch 5 is updating the dependencies across the board to the following versions:
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Spring Framework 6
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Spring Integration 6
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Spring Data 3
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Spring AMQP 3
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Spring for Apache Kafka 3
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Micrometer 1.10
This release also marks the migration to Jakarta EE 9 APIs.
Batch Infrastructure Configuration Updates
Spring Batch 5 includes the following infrastructure configuration updates:
DataSource Requirement Updates
Historically, Spring Batch provided a map-based job repository and job explorer implementations to work with an in-memory job repository. These implementations were deprecated in version 4 and completely removed in version 5. The recommended replacement is to use the JDBC-based implementations with an embedded database, such as H2, HSQL, and others.
In this release, the @EnableBatchProcessing annotation configures a JDBC-based JobRepository, which requires a
DataSource bean in the application context. The DataSource bean could refer to an embedded database to work with
an in-memory job repository.
Transaction Manager Bean Exposure
Until version 4.3, the @EnableBatchProcessing annotation exposed a transaction manager bean in the application
context. While this was convenient in many cases, the unconditional exposure of a transaction manager could
interfere with a user-defined transaction manager. In this release, @EnableBatchProcessing no longer exposes a
transaction manager bean in the application context.
New features
Batch tracing with Micrometer
With the upgrade to Micrometer 1.10, you can now get batch tracing in addition to batch metrics. Spring Batch will create a span for each job and a span for each step within a job. This tracing meta-data can be collected and viewed on a dahsboard like Zipkin for example.
Support for SAP HANA a job repository in Spring Batch
This release introduces the support of SAP HANA as an additional supported database for the job repository.
New Maven Bill Of Materials for Spring Batch modules
This feature has been requested several times and is finally shipped in v5. It is now possible to use the newly added Maven BOM to import Spring Batch modules with a consistent version number.
UTF-8 by default
Several issues related to characters encoding have been reported over the years in different areas of the framework, like inconsitent default encoding between file-based item readers and writers, serialization/deserialization issues when dealing with multi-byte characters in the execution context, etc.
In the same spirit as JEP 400 and following the UTF-8 manifesto, this release updates the default encoding to UTF-8 in all areas of the framework and ensures this default is configurable as needed.
Native support
The effort towards providing support to compile Spring Batch applications as native executables using the GraalVM native-image compiler has started in v4.2 and was shipped as experimental in v4.3.
In this release, the native support has been improved significantly and is now considered out of beta.
Pruning
Spring Batch 5 removes a number of items that are no longer needed, including:
API deprecation and removal
In this major release, all APIs that were deprecated in previous versions have been removed. Moreover, some APIs have been deprecated in v5.0 and are scheduled for removal in v5.2. Finally, some APIs have been moved or removed without deprecation for practical reasons.
Please refer to the migration guide for more details about these changes.