Spring 4.0.0 backward compatibility

Question

I've searched and couldn't find anything to suggest that Spring 4.0.0 is not fully backward compatible with Spring 3.x.

Is that indeed the case?

Answer 1

You should be safe if you have updated your third-party dependencies and updated any Spring deprecations in your project. Spring Framework project lead Juergen Hoeller writes in the blog Migrating from Spring Framework 3.2 to 4.0.1:

To a large degree, an upgrade from Spring Framework 3.2 (or earlier) to 4.0.1 should be as straightforward as a change of version numbers in your Maven POMs. Note that you may have to upgrade specific third-party dependencies to a recent enough version (e.g. Hibernate 3.6+, Quartz 1.8+, Jackson 1.8+, Tiles 2.2+)

Read the migration guide on GitHub for details.