SPRING BOOT
An age of innovation
“The Spring Framework has been around for over a decade and has found a place as the de facto standard framework for developing Java applications. With such a long and storied history, some might think that Spring has settled, resting on its laurels, and is not doing anything new or exciting. Some might even say that Spring is legacy and that it’s time to look elsewhere for innovation.
Some would be wrong.
There are many exciting new things taking place in the Spring ecosystem, including work in the areas of cloud computing, big data, schema-less data persistence, reactive programming, and client-side application development. Perhaps the most exciting, most head-turning, most game-changing new thing to come to Spring in the past year or so is Spring Boot. Spring Boot offers a new paradigm for developing Spring applications with minimal friction.”
-Craig Walls
Spring Boot is an open source Java-based framework used for making application development easy, by avoiding some tedious development steps and creating essential boilerplate code and configuration. More than that Spring Boot is also used heavily for building micro services based applications. It is used for creating web as well as enterprise applications. With the advent of container related technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes, the importance of Spring Boot have increased.
History of Spring boot
Initially spring was launched in 2002 and various frameworks built on top of it such as Spring Boot have come to dominate the way java developers code. Rod Johnson along with Juergen Hoeller and Yann Caroff developed spring as an open source framework. In 2013 , to improved support for ‘containerless’ web application architectures. As earlier there was a problem with the web applications embedded in servlet container which comes with learning curve that we cannot assume new developers will have to overcome. To solve this on August 6,2013 Phil Webb went on to create Spring Boot and fix the problem of spring framework by creating another framework.
How Spring Boot is used to develop a Microservice applications?
“Microservices, in a nutshell, allows us to break our large system into a number of independent collaborating components.”
Spring Boot is used to create many micro service based applications. Micro Service is an architecture that allows the developers to develop and deploy services independently. Each service running has its own process and this achieves the lightweight model to support business applications. It’s very smart to know how to get them working together can quickly setup services with minimal configurations.
Advantages
Micro services offers the following advantages to its developers −
- Easy deployment
- Simple scalability
- Compatible with Containers
- Minimum configuration
- Lesser production time
Value proposition of spring boot
You can choose Spring Boot because of the features and benefits it offers as given here –
· It provides a flexible way to configure Java Beans, XML configurations, and Database Transactions.
· It provides a powerful batch processing and manages REST endpoints.
· In Spring Boot, everything is auto configured; no manual configurations are needed.
· It offers annotation-based spring application
· Eases dependency management
· It includes Embedded Servlet Container
Advantages of Spring Boot based applications
Spring Boot offers the following advantages to its developers −
- Easy to understand and develop spring applications
- Increases productivity
- Reduces the development time
Goals
Spring Boot is designed with the following goals −
- To avoid complex XML configuration in Spring
- To develop a production ready Spring applications in an easier way
- To reduce the development time and run the application independently
- Offer an easier way of getting started with the application
Creating a Spring Boot Application
The best way to create a new Spring Boot application is to use https://start.spring.io. This is what is more commonly known as the Spring Initializer. It helps to cook up a working Spring Boot application in almost no time. On the page that opens, you need to fill in a few details. In the field Group, enter the high-level package name. This can be the domain. The artifact could be the name of the application. Click on Switch to Full Version to see all the details to be entered.Enter the Group as com.progressivecoder.demo and Artifact as spring-boot-starter. Note that we have selected the Maven Project at the top. Gradle can also be selected. In the languages dropdown, you could opt for Kotlin or Groovy. In this example, we have selected Java.
The next important step is to select the various packages or features in the application. This step is similar to selecting the dependencies in a typical Maven or dependencies available. Select a few important dependencies like Web, Rest Repositories, JPA, H2, and Actuator.
At this point, click on the big green button that says Generate Project. Alternatively, you can press Alt + Enter. The project will be downloaded to your computer.
Note- This article is written keeping in mind the basics of spring boot in simple words to provide a better understanding of it’s future applications.
