The spring-boot-starter-parent dependency inherits from spring-boot-dependencies, which is defined at the top of the POM. The following code snippet shows an extract from spring-boot-starter-parent:

    <parent>
      <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
      <artifactId>spring-boot-dependencies</artifactId>
      <relativePath>../../spring-boot-dependencies</relativePath>
   </parent>

spring-boot-dependencies provides default dependency management for all the dependencies that Spring Boot uses. The following code shows the different versions of various dependencies that are configured in spring-boot-dependencies:

<activemq.version>5.15.8</activemq.version>
<aspectj.version>1.9.2</aspectj.version>
<ehcache.version>2.10.6</ehcache.version>
<elasticsearch.version>6.4.3</elasticsearch.version>
<gson.version>2.8.5</gson.version>
<h2.version>1.4.197</h2.version>
<hazelcast.version>3.11</hazelcast.version>
<hibernate.version>5.3.7.Final</hibernate.version>
<hibernate-validator.version>6.0.13.Final</hibernate-validator.version>
<hsqldb.version>2.4.1</hsqldb.version>
<htmlunit.version>2.33</htmlunit.version>
<jackson.version>2.9.7</jackson.version>
<jersey.version>2.27</jersey.version>
<jetty.version>9.4.12.v20180830</jetty.version>
<junit.version>4.12</junit.version>
<junit-jupiter.version>5.3.2</junit-jupiter.version>
<mockito.version>2.23.4</mockito.version>
<selenium.version>3.14.0</selenium.version>
<servlet-api.version>4.0.1</servlet-api.version>
<spring.version>5.1.3.RELEASE</spring.version>
<spring-amqp.version>2.1.2.RELEASE</spring-amqp.version>
<spring-batch.version>4.1.0.RELEASE</spring-batch.version>
<spring-hateoas.version>0.25.0.RELEASE</spring-hateoas.version>
<spring-restdocs.version>2.0.2.RELEASE</spring-restdocs.version>
<spring-security.version>5.1.2.RELEASE</spring-security.version>
<spring-ws.version>3.0.4.RELEASE</spring-ws.version>
<tomcat.version>9.0.13</tomcat.version>
<xml-apis.version>1.4.01</xml-apis.version>

If we want to override a specific version of a dependency, we can do that by providing a property with the correct name in the pom.xml file of our application. The following code snippet shows an example of configuring a specific version of Mockito:

    <properties>
     <mockito.version>1.10.20</mockito.version>
    </properties>

The following are some of the other things that are defined in spring-boot-starter-parent:

• The default Java version, <java.version>1.8</java.version>.
• The default configuration for Maven plugins:
  • maven-failsafe-plugin
  • maven-surefire-plugin
  • git-commit-id-plugin

Compatibility between different versions of frameworks is one of the major problems that's faced by developers.

How do I find the latest Spring Session version that is compatible with a specific version of Spring? The usual answer would be to read the documentation.

However, if we use Spring Boot, this is made simple by spring-boot-starter-parent. If we want to upgrade to a newer Spring version, all we need to do is find the spring-boot-starter-parent dependency for that Spring version.