To maintain a lean Spring Framework, we have removed outdated features and deprecated others in favor of more up-to-date alternatives.
The following features and classes are no longer used by the vast majority of Spring users and have been removed:
WebLogic 8.1 and WebSphere 5.1 support
Any application server that requires Java 1.4 cannot support applications that use Spring Framework 3.0. For Java 1.4 environments, we recommend the continued use of Spring 2.5.x.
Native TopLink API support (superseded by JPA)
Support for TopLink native APIs has been removed from Spring 3.0. The support provided in Spring Framework 2.5.x is for TopLink 9 and 10. The newer TopLink 11 has a modified API, which Spring does not support. If you use TopLink 9 or 10 and want to use Spring 3.0, we recommend that you migrate your code to TopLink or Eclipse Link JPA.
Commons Attributes support (superseded by Java 5 annotations)
The Commons Attributes support made sense before Java 5 and its annotation support. This was a long time ago and if you haven't already migrated your code to use Java 5 annotations, now is the time to do so.
Jakarta JSTL support for JSP 1.2 (superseded by JSP 2.0)
Apache Tomcat version 4.1 and some other application servers based on J2EE 1.3 used older Servlet and JSP specifications that are no longer supported. Tomcat 5.0 and later as well as all other application servers supported by Spring (see Section 2.2, “Java EE Support”) use Servlet Specification 2.4 and JSP Specification 2.0 or later. If you are using one of these supported servers all you need to do is have your application include the correct version of the JSP JSTL API jar (version 1.1.2 for JSP 2.0 and version 1.2.0 for JSP 2.1). If you are using an older application server you would need to upgrade to a more recent version and also upgrade your web application to use a newer Servlet and JSP specification.
ContextLoaderServlet and Log4jConfigServlet (use the corresponding Listener instead)
The application servers that required the use of the ContextLoaderServlet and Log4jConfigServlet (there were some issues with the order the listeners were called on startup) are no longer supported and there is no need to use these startup servlets any more. The ContextLoaderListener and Log4jConfigListener provide the same functionality.