Dear Spring community,

It is my pleasure to announce that a feature-complete Spring Framework 4.3 release candidate is available now! This is a perfect opportunity for you to get involved: Please run your regression tests against it, and of course, feel free to try the new features...

Dependency injection refinements:

* @Autowired injection of Map/Collection beans and self references * @Autowired on configuration class constructors (finally!) * No need for declaring @Autowired on a unique non-default constructor * ObjectProvider as a richer variant of an ObjectFactory handle * InjectionPoint/DependencyDescriptor as an injectable argument for @Bean methods

MVC processing refinements:

* Default processing of OPTIONS, HEAD, Allow and If-Unmodified-Since * Support for custom HTTP Vary configuration and HTTP Range on custom resources * Precomposed @GetMapping, @PostMapping, @RequestScope, @SessionScope etc * @RequestAttribute and @SessionAttribute as handler method arguments * Full support for Jackson 2.7's new type resolution algorithm

Various infrastructural refinements across the framework:

* Wider support for composed annotations and for placeholders/expressions in attributes * Richer programmatic metadata in core container exceptions * Component scanning in manifest-defined classpath entries * A background initialization option for bootstrapping JPA / Hibernate * A 'sync' flag on @Cacheable and support for the Caffeine cache provider

We are working towards an RC2 with some remaining fine-tuning and performance improvements in the meantime, preparing for 4.3's general availability on June 1st!

Cheers, Juergen