Spring boot & hibernate validator version

Question

Why the newest spring boot 1.1.5 uses Hibernate validator 5.0.3 if there is already 5.1.2 version ?

Is there some technical reason (incompatibility with Spring) for it or it is safe to use exclusion in maven and manage it myself ?

Answer 1

Why the newest spring boot 1.1.5 uses Hibernate validator 5.0.3 if there is already 5.1.2 version ?

I'm not a developer on the spring boot team, but if I were to make an assumption I would say that constantly keeping up to the newest version of a library could be difficult to maintain stability with something that so many people depend on such as the spring framework and soon spring boot.

Perhaps this applies to your software as well? If you have no specific need for the 5.1 features then at least you know that 5.0.3 passed all of the tests the spring boot team has put together.

Is there some technical reason (incompatibility with Spring) for it or it is safe to use exclusion in maven and manage it myself ?

This is diffucult to answer but when you have this question often times a migration guide gives you the best answer, here is the hibernate-validator migration guide.

https://community.jboss.org/wiki/HibernateValidatorMigrationGuide

Just from eyeballing the changes I can't really see where including 5.1 would mess up in the newest spring boot, but I can't be 100% certain on that.

But if you really need the features of 5.1 and you do not know if they will work perhaps the best advice was given many many years ago.

One must learn by doing the thing;
    for though you think you know it you have no certainty, until you try.

— Sophocles

Supporting article on this concept http://blog.8thlight.com/kevin-buchanan/2014/05/20/be-empirical.html