I haven't kept up with all of the changes to the spring framework since 2.5. I am looking for a sample application for 4.0 that has a basic skeleton app with hibernate done the 4.0 way with controllers and services.
I've googled and looked at the spring site, which I think has been made much worse in the last year or so. Can anyone help me out?
Take look at Spring Guides, all with Spring 4.0.
(..) these guides are designed to get you productive as quickly as possible – using the latest Spring project releases and techniques as recommended by the Spring team.
I think tutorial Data Access with Spring can help you, especially step 3:
with source code: https://github.com/spring-guides/tut-data
There is also Getting Started Guide, designed to be completed in 15-30 minutes
with source code: https://github.com/spring-guides/gs-accessing-data-jpa.
This give you general look at possibilites. You can use solutions from this (like Spring Data JPA etc) with or without Spring Boot.
There is also Appfuse 3.0 recently released with support for Spring 4.0.
AppFuse is a full-stack framework for building web applications on the JVM. It was originally developed to eliminate the ramp-up time when building new web applications. Over the years, it has matured into a very testable and secure system for creating Java-based webapps.
AppFuse is full of good patterns, simply build new project from appfuse archetype and take look.