Spring Boot vs WildFly Swarm In the Land of Enterprise Java
Microservices concept has long been much more than a hype, it is real. In the land of Enterprise Java, two of the most popular frameworks for microservices are Spring Boot and WildFly Swarm.
For a long time we have been using WildFly heavily on my day to day job. After seeing how easy and painless Spring Boot is, I tried WildFly Swarm as an alternative mechanism for enterprise Java deployment. This post is all about my experience in using both technologies.
By the way, in the mean time we also decided to convert our Application Server + WAR deployments to some kind of `java -jar blahBlahApp.jar` kind of applications.
Documentation
WildFly Swarm has a decent documentation for beginners, it is easy to follow and apply. Level of detail and conciseness compared to Spring’s Guides is a bit low but it is still good.
Verdict: With the excellent guide and explanation for newbies Spring Boot easily wins here.
Out of Box Project Structure Generation
If one needs to generate a project structure with the main dependencies, Swarm has a ‘WildFly Swarm Project Generator’. Compared to Spring’s Initializr this is a much more humble and simple solution but hey at least it works. It generates the necessary maven project structure available to download. It lacks the Gradle support though.
Verdict: With the more extensive set of out of box dependencies and support for Gradle support out of box Spring Boot wins here.
Database Layer
If JPA is the way to talk to your database, then Spring saves you from a lot of code bloat thanks to Spring Data JPA. Unfortunately Java EE has no equivalent.
Verdict: With the auto generated simple queries Spring Boot wins here.
Community
If you search ‘WildFly Swarm’ in Google you get roughly 75K results. However the search term ‘Spring Boot’ gives about 86M results. It means there are about 1000 Spring Boot search result for every WildFly Swarm search result.
StackOverflow
Compared to 55 ‘wildfly-swarm’ tagged questions there are 19627 ‘spring-boot’ tagged questions as of this post’s writing.
Verdict: Spring Boot wins big here. Especially in the StackOverflow community the difference is huge in terms of community support.
Overall Verdict
There is much to talk about Spring vs Swarm in terms of performance, ease of security integration, third party tool integration, IDE support etc.
However, if you are a startup and you decide to use Java then most probably you chose Spring Boot.