:star: New features

• Allow StaxEventItemReader to auto-detect the input file encoding #4101

:rocket: Enhancements

• Disable Docker-based tests when Docker is not available #4360
• JobParameters should use LinkedHashMap instead of HashMap #4179
• Slow Query in JdbcJobInstanceDao.getLastJobInstance() #4024
• Make KafkaItemWriter extensible and document its thread-safety #3970
• Upgrade to Mockito 5 #4366
• Enhance switch statements #4365
• Change visibility of properties in JdbcPagingItemReaderBuilder #4331
• Reduce use of deprecated APIs #4334
• Add SafeVarargs annotations #4335

:lady_beetle: Bug fixes

• Incorrect v5 migration script for SQLServer #4349
• Implement equals and hashCode in Chunk class #4314
• Incorrect retrieval of job parameters in SimpleJobExplorer#getJobExecutions #4246

:notebook_with_decorative_cover: Documentation

• Fix BATCH_STEP_EXECUTION DDL #4356
• Fix for the XML/Java switch regression #4355
• Documentation Update to scalability.adoc #4338
• Fix tiny misspelling in the sybase integration test comments #4313
• Missing instruction about accessing historical data in the migration guide #4352
• Document Thread Safety of item readers and writers #3646
• Missing DDL migration script related to BATCH_STEP_EXECUTION table in v5 migration guide #4332
• Incorrect type of date/time fields in documentation #4324
• Asciidoctor errors #4168

:hammer: Tasks

• Forks fail on GitHub Actions Continuous Inspection Build #4346
• Intermittent failure in AsynchronousTests#testRollback #4095
• Intermittent failure in ConcurrentTransactionAwareProxyTests on windows #3847

🆙 Dependency Upgrades

• Spring Framework: 6.0.9
• Spring Retry: 2.0.1
• Spring AMQP: 3.0.4
• Spring Data: 3.0.6
• Spring Integration: 6.0.5
• Spring Kafka: 3.0.7
• Spring LDAP: 3.0.3
• Micrometer: 1.10.7

:heart: Contributors

Thank you to all the contributors who worked on this release:

@Buzzardo, @Ditscheridou, @cppwfs, @hpoettker, @jamesrwoodruff, @kajsa, and @viviennes7

Full change log: https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-batch/compare/v5.0.1...v5.0.2