This is a great initiative. Thank you for taking the steps to explore it until a working state. I started “Operaton 2.0” discussion with SpringBoot 4 in mind next to other major challenges. And first I thought, we can not or should not have Spring Boot 3 and 4 support at the same time in the same development stream.
Today, I am thinking different because you have shown that this can co-exist. This is a great value if we can leave Operaton users still work with SB3, while new projects can have SB4 already.
For the distributions I think they should advance to Spring 7/SpringBoot 4 soon. Users that embed Operaton with SB3/S7 won’t have to change anything. But those that use the distributions should get the latest state of the art.
We should also start to work on migration recipes that upgrade an Operaton SB3 app to SB4. The existing repository is dedicated to the Camunda-to-Operaton migration, so sounds like the need for a new repository for Operaton-self refactorings.
I will soon explore your PoC in detail.