What’s New in Spring Boot 2.2? Key Features and Improvements Explained

Spring Boot 2.2 was released shortly after Spring Framework 5.2.0, bringing the first version 2.2.0. This article reviews the notable updates.

Component version updates

The following Spring components have updated dependencies:

Spring AMQP 2.2

Spring Batch 4.2

Spring Data Moore

Spring Framework 5.2

Spring HATEOAS 1.0

Spring Integration 5.2

Spring Kafka 2.3

Spring Security 5.2

Spring Session Corn

Third‑party libraries also received version bumps:

Elasticsearch 6.7

Flyway 6.0

Jackson 2.10

JUnit 5.5

Micrometer 1.3

Reactor Dysprosium

Solr 8.0

Significant performance improvements

Spring Boot 2.2 introduces major performance optimizations: faster startup and lower memory consumption. It also adds a global lazy‑initialization property spring.main.lazy-initialization, which speeds up startup but may increase request latency and defer startup errors.

Java 13 support

With Spring Framework 5.2 adding Java 13 support, Spring Boot 2.2 inherits this capability while maintaining compatibility with Java 11 and Java 8.

Immutable @ConfigurationProperties binding

Configuration properties now support constructor‑based binding, making @ConfigurationProperties classes immutable. Use @ConstructorBinding together with @ConfigurationProperties, and you can apply annotations such as @DefaultValue and @DateTimeFormat on constructor parameters.

RSocket support

A starter spring-boot-starter-rsocket provides auto‑configuration for RSocket. When spring-security-rsocket is on the classpath, Spring Security integration is also configured automatically.

Health‑check grouping

Actuator health indicators can now be grouped, useful for Kubernetes liveness and readiness probes. Example configuration:

management.endpoint.health.group.custom.include=db

Access the custom group via localhost:8080/actuator/health/custom.

Other updates

Additional changes and improvements are listed in the official release notes.