We all have at least one framework/technology we love and try hard to keep up with. The one we read never ending blog posts on. The one we use on our side projects. For me that has been Spring boot for a while now.
I have used a few other frameworks, but have always come back to Spring boot and here are six reasons why:
A Spring library for all your needs
With Spring, most of the libraries or features you need for your cloud-native service (or micro service), have already been developed and are ready for you to use. This is true for a wide variety of features ranging from security (spring-security) to documentation (spring-rest-docs) and everything else you may need on the cloud (streams, service registry, cloud config etc)! For the most part, adding an additional library as a dependency in your pom.xml or build.gradle file is all it takes to have everything else auto-configured and wired in ready for use. For example, the spring provides an actuator library, spring-boot-starter-actuator that, among other things exposes an API endpoint to to report on the status of your app. To get this working all you have to do is add that actuator dependency to your pom.xml or build.gradle file and *TADA* your app should now have a health check endpoint with its status!
Constant updates
One of the other reasons I would pick Spring boot on any given day for all my ReSTful service needs is they stay on top of the game. There are constant updates and regular releases of libraries. There are also new libraries that try to stay ahead. My recent favorite is the spring-kofu (YES, they also support cool languages out of the box!) project which provides a neat functional Kotlin DSL way to configure Spring boot apps.
Excellent community support
The updates are not just for the libraries. The devs on the spring team do an excellent job of responding to questions/PRs/suggestions, be it on GitHub, StackOverflow or any other forum.
Detailed blogs with tons of examples
This might sound geeky but I always look forward to Josh Long’s “This week in Spring” blog posts. They are packed with goodies from the Spring community and a wide range of others in the Java/Kotlin world, etc. This series is just the beginning. Spring provides blog posts and “How to” guides on just about all spring libraries. This really helps developers, even the ones new to the Spring eco system, hit the ground running.
Infrastructure support
I will confess that I have not had a chance to use Pivotal Cloud Foundry on an actual production app yet (if you are wondering… here is an article that may help). But in talking to other folks who have, it sounds fantastic! The more exciting part of this is Pivotal also provides a container and function service!
Social events
As if the blog posts and guides on Spring’s blog were not enough, the developers on the Spring team can be seen talking at conferences/meetups all over the world! What’s more? Spring also hosts its own conferences: SpringOne and Spring I/O. I attended SpringOne in 2017 and absolutely loved it! You can also catch up on the video recordings of the sessions after they are uploaded.
Spring boot truly makes ReSTful service development not only easy but also fun. The Spring team has really made the effort to make the barrier of entry as minimal as possible with all their support via blogs/meetup talks/conferences etc.
If you would start building your bootiful app here is a link!
You can read this blog as it was originally posted on Janani Subbiah’s blog.
