Spring Cloud development team yesterday released the Spring Cloud 2020 year road map, and Spring Cloud Greenwich and Hoxton life cycle of some explanation.
Spring Cloud Ilford
Spring Cloud Ilford development team says will be the next major release, which will also be released since the Spring Cloud Finchley first major release. This release provides support for Spring Boot 2.x and the Spring Framework 5.x. By Ilford become a major release, the development team will be able to delete into maintenance mode ( Maintenance the MODE module), and the honor earlier this year announced a new version of the simplified commitment. In addition, team members will also reconstruct some API, which may introduce major changes.
Spring Cloud Ilford will vary with the Spring Framework 5.3 and Spring Boot release sometime in the fourth quarter of 2020 with 2.4.
Spring Cloud Hoxton
According to Pivotal support policy for open source projects , major version of support for a period of three years. Spring Cloud Finchley was first released in June 2018, therefore, Spring Cloud Hoxton as a minor version Finchley will receive regular support until the end of June 2021. From July 2021 began, Hoxton will enter a special maintenance period, during which the team posted only important bug fixes and security patches, until the end of December 2021. Thus, the team accepted exist (maintaining) the length of time the two major versions for one year.
In addition, plans to release in the second quarter of 2020 Spring Boot 2.3.x will soon get support Hoxton Service Release after release.
Spring Cloud Greenwich
Spring Cloud Greenwich as a minor version of Finchley was first released in January 2019, it supported time as of January 2020, then will enter a particular maintenance period. Similarly, in the meantime, the development team released only important bug fixes and security patches, until the end of December 2020. This will be the last to support Spring Boot 2.1.x version.
Here we look at the 2020 maintenance road map Spring framework ( Spring Framework Maintenance Roadmap in 2020 ).
Let me talk about the most important point, Spring Framework 4.3.x and the entire Spring Framework 4 will end the life cycle in the next year: official said EOL deadline is 31 December 2020. After this, the development team will not provide any support for 4.3.x. At the same time, they will be phased out 5.0.x and 5.1.x.
As for plans to release versions, starting with a full release in mid-January: 5.2.3 and 5.1.13 and 5.0.16 and 4.3.26. The latter is the last maintenance release 5.0.x and 4.3.x series. If there are loopholes, the development team might be important patch repair, or until the end of 2020 before the final deadline, these versions are not planning further release.
5.1.x series will get regular maintenance in 2020, but publishing frequency will be relatively low, keeping every quarter. The current main activities branch is 5.2.x, will be released frequently (once a month) in the next year, not only support the current Spring Boot 2.2, also supports the upcoming Spring Boot 2.3 (April 2020).
Finally, the next version of the Spring Framework features (feature release) will be 5.3, GA plans to release in October 2020, in order to be consistent with the Spring Boot 2.4. This is expected to be the last of the 5.x branch function, and long-term support. The team also said it plans to package themes for all 5.x 5.3, the adjustment (startup performance, memory consumption), including run-time.
By the way, the development team also recommended that users upgrade to 5.2+ as soon as possible, since the end of 2020, the only active branch of the Spring framework will be 5.2.x, 5.3.x and then the new product line (expected to receive long-term support, effective from replace 4.3.x).