On behalf of the Spring community, we’re excited to share that Spring gRPC 0.9.0 is now officially available on Maven Central. This release brings important improvements and paves the way toward the upcoming 1.0.0 milestone, aligning with the broader Spring ecosystem's evolution — especially with Spring Boot 4.0.0 on the horizon.
In this post, we’ll walk you through what’s new in this release, why it matters, and how it could impact your gRPC-based applications.
What Is Spring gRPC?
Spring gRPC is a community-driven integration project that simplifies using gRPC within the Spring Boot ecosystem. It makes setting up servers and clients for gRPC feel as natural and streamlined as building REST APIs with Spring Boot.
Whether you're building internal microservices or public APIs, Spring gRPC helps you adopt the gRPC protocol with minimal friction.
What’s New in Version 0.9.0?
Here’s a quick summary of the most notable updates in Spring gRPC 0.9.0:
1. Upgraded to Spring Boot 3.5
This version now fully supports Spring Boot 3.5, bringing you improved compatibility with the latest Spring Framework features and security patches. It's an essential update if you're modernizing your Spring applications and want to keep your dependencies up-to-date.
2. StubFactory Contract Overhaul
A key architectural change is in the StubFactory interface:
-> The supports() method is now a static method, allowing the framework to evaluate factory support before an instance is created.
This change improves the initialization performance and avoids unnecessary instantiations, which can be especially beneficial in high-load applications.
3. GrpcClientFactoryCustomizer Removed
In favor of better flexibility and alignment with other parts of the framework, GrpcClientFactoryCustomizer has been deprecated and removed.
Replaced with: GrpcChannelBuilderCustomizer
This new approach allows more fine-grained control over how gRPC channels are configured, especially with advanced settings such as TLS, interceptors, and load balancing.
4. Interceptor Filtering for In-Process gRPC Clients
This release introduces the ability to filter interceptors when working with in-process gRPC clients. This means you can now more easily control which interceptors are applied to which calls — a welcome addition for testing, tracing, or metric collection scenarios.
5. Global Interceptor & Service Definition Filtering
Global interceptors and service definitions are now filterable, both for:
-> InProcessGrpcServer (straightforward)
-> NettyGrpcServer (via registering a customizer)
This gives developers powerful control over which parts of the application logic should be intercepted or exposed under different conditions, leading to cleaner and more modular service implementations.
Why This Release Matters
Spring gRPC 0.9.0 is more than just a routine update — it represents a key transition phase toward Spring Boot 4 compatibility and further stability for production use.
With Spring gRPC maturing toward its 1.0.0 release, the project is solidifying its contracts, modernizing internal patterns, and enhancing extensibility — all with developer productivity in mind.
What’s Next?
The Spring gRPC team has confirmed that a 1.0.0 release is expected soon, likely aligning with the release of Spring Boot 4.0.0. If you're using gRPC with Spring in production or planning to, now is a great time to:
-> Test your services against the 0.9.0 release
-> Upgrade to Spring Boot 3.5 if you haven’t already
-> Explore the new customization features to refine your architecture
Get Started
To try out Spring gRPC 0.9.0, simply add the following to your pom.xml:
net.devh
grpc-spring-boot-starter
0.9.0.RELEASE
For Gradle:
implementation("net.devh:grpc-spring-boot-starter:0.9.0.RELEASE")
Final Thoughts
The Spring gRPC project continues to evolve with thoughtful design and practical developer needs in mind. Version 0.9.0 brings improvements in compatibility, performance, and customization, all of which help developers build reliable and scalable distributed systems with gRPC.
Keep an eye out for the 1.0.0 release, and consider contributing or sharing feedback on the GitHub repository.
Link
Happy coding!
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