Juergen Hoeller opened SPR-13235 and commented

Velocity 1.7 dates back to 2010. After more than five years of no maintenance in the original project, it's about time to deprecate Velocity support on Spring's side.

Issue Links:

• Deprecate Hibernate 3 support [SPR-13230] #17821 Deprecate Hibernate 3 support
• Documentation still favoring velocity but it is deprecated in 4.3 [SPR-14460] #19029 Documentation still favoring velocity but it is deprecated in 4.3
• Remove Velocity support [SPR-13795] #18368 Remove Velocity support

Referenced from: commits 0e68d2e, a2a9c47