Spring projects are listed and documented on the spring.io website. We can find there information about releases, samples, support and more.
Spring.io also exposes a RESTful web service under https://spring.io/api for fetching and updating Spring Projects Metadata. It uses hypermedia to describe the relationships between resources and to allow navigation between them.
The source of this application is available in the Sagan project.
This web service exposes resources with the application/hal+json Media Type.
Requests sent to this service should Accept this type, like:
This web service is publicly available here: https://spring.io/api.
Fetching resources using the HTTP GET method is permitted to all clients.
Other HTTP verbs like POST, PUT, PATCH and DELETE require authentication.
Authenticated requests should send
a GitHub personal access token as basic authentication
with the read:org scope enabled. The user associated with this token must be a member of the Spring team on GitHub.
The root endpoint of this web service lists the main resources: Projects and Repositories:
The links allow you to access other resources:
Spring Projects are listed on the official projects page. A Spring Project has an official name in the Spring portfolio. Its sources can be found in a git repository. The team in charge of this project will build the sources and release the resulting artifacts in an Artifact Repository.
Some projects are part of a Release train, i.e. a set of project releases that are known to be compatible. Such projects are gathered under an umbrella project (or parent project).
We can GET the full collection of Spring Projects using the "projects" link provided at the root of the service:
We can then fetch an individual project using its "self" link when listed in the full collection, for example for the Spring Boot project:
Project responses provide links to other related resources:
Each Project has an official support status; the goal here is to set expectations about the type of support you can expect from the Spring team:
| Incubating |
an experiment which might/might no be officially supported in the future. |
| Active |
actively and officially supported by the Spring team. |
| Community |
actively supported by the Spring community with limited involvement from the Spring team. |
| End Of Life |
not supported anymore; there won’t be new releases for this project. |
The Project team selects the currently relevant releases; they’re often releases that belong to active Project Generations.
We can get the list of releases for a given project by following the "releases" link on the Project resource:
We can fetch a single release by following its canonical link:
- SNAPSHOT
-
Unstable release with limited support; SNAPSHOT versions are released continuously
- PRERELEASE
-
Also known as Milestone, this a release meant to be tested by the community
- GENERAL_AVAILABILITY
-
Release Generally Available on public artifact repositories and getting full support from maintainers
Release responses provide links to other related resources:
We can add a new Release to a Project:
|
Note
|
This request requires Authentication. |
We can delete an existing Release from a Project:
|
Note
|
This request requires Authentication. |
Each project has an official Support Status, but not all releases are supported at any time. Releases are grouped as Generations. Depending on the project and its release policy, a Generation usually regroups all maintenance Releases for a given minor version or a specific release train.
Developers should upgrade to the latest Release at their earliest convenience; the Spring team helps drive that decision by providing end of support dates for each generation.
Each project generation has two periods of active support: Open Source support and Commercial support. All releases cut during these support periods are publicly available in the artifact repositories.
We can get the list of generations for a given project by following the "generations" link on the Project resource:
We can of course fetch a single generation by following its canonical link:
This endpoint supports conditional requests with "If-Modified-Since" request headers.
To avoid fetching and parsing a generation or the list of generations for a given project,
clients can issue conditional requests like:
If the project generations haven’t been updated in the meantime, the server will respond with a "304 Not Modified" status.
Releases are hosted on public Artifact Repositories. The Spring team deploys artifacts to different repositories, depending on the Release Status. You can configure your build system to resolve dependencies from the artifact repositories listed by this service. "Generally Available" releases are also available on Maven Central and its mirrors.
Each Project Release has a link to an Artifact Repository resource.
You can fetch the full list of repositories managed by the Spring team by following the "repositories" link on the root endpoint:
And get a single repository by following its canonical link: