Perhaps you've heard about Spring Boot? It's cultivated the most popular explosion in software development in years. Clocking millions of downloads per month, the community has exploded since its debut in 2013.
I hope you're ready for some fun, because we are going to take things to the next level as we use Spring Boot to build a social media platform. We'll explore its many valuable features, all the way from the tools designed to speed up development efforts to production-ready support as well as cloud-native features.
Despite some rapid fire demos you might have caught on YouTube, Spring Boot isn't just for quick demos. Built atop the de facto standard toolkit for Java, the Spring Framework, Spring Boot will help us build this social media platform with lightning speed and stability.
Also, this book will explore a new paradigm introduced in Spring Framework 5, reactive programming. In this day and age, as we build bigger systems, iterate faster, and host fleets of distributed microservices, it has become critical that we switch from a classic blocking programming style. As Josh Long would point out, this is nothing new. The network stacks of today's OSs are inherently asynchronous, but the JVM is not. Only in recent years have people realized the need to chop up tasks in a asynchronous, non-blocking fashion. However, the programming paradigm to handle potentially unlimited streams of data coming at fluctuating times requires a new programming model, which we will explore carefully alongside the power of Spring Boot itself.
In this chapter, we'll get a quick kick off with Spring Boot using the Java programming language. Maybe that makes you chuckle? People have been dissing Java for years as being slow, bulky, and not a good language for agile shops. In this chapter, we'll see how that is not the case.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- Creating a bare project using the Spring Initializr found at http://start.spring.io
- Exploring Spring Boot's management of third-party libraries
- Seeing how to run our app straight inside our Integrated Development Environment (IDE) with no standalone containers
- Using Spring Boot's property support to make external adjustments
- Packaging our app into a self-contained, runnable JAR file
- Deploying our app into the cloud
- Adding out-of-the-box production-grade support tools
