Question

What is difference between spring 3 and spring 4?

Answer 1

Spring 3.

New features in Spring 3.0 compare to its previous version:
- Spring MVC Test Framework
- Asynchronous MVC processing on Servlet 3.0
- custom @Bean definition annotations in @Configuration classes
- @Autowired and @Value to be used as meta-annotations
- Concurrency refinements across the framework
- Loading WebApplicationContexts in the TestContext framework
- JCache 0.5 (JSR-107)


Spring 4..

New features in Spring 4.0 compare to Spring 3.0:
- JSR-335 Lambda expressions
- JSR-310 Date-Time value types for Spring data binding and formatting.
- JSR-343 JMS 2.0.
- JSR-338 JPA 2.1.
- JSR-349 Bean Validation 1.1.
- JSR-236 Java EE 7 Enterprise Concurrency support.
- JSR-356 Spring’s WebSocket endpoint mode.
- Configuring and implementing Spring style application using Groovy 2. Also they specify that first class support for the Groovy applications.
- Also spring plans to add the HATEOS (Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State) support for REST APIs.