In December 2013, Pivotal announced the release of spring framework 4.0. Spring 4.0 was major step forward for spring framework and it included features such as full support for Java 8, higher third party library dependencies(groovy 1.8+, ehcache 2.1+, hibernate 3.6+ etc.), Java EE 7 support, groovy DSL for bean definitions, support for websockets and support for generic types as a qualifier for injecting beans.
