Why use Spring Boot for advanced projects?

Welcome to the beginning of your journey into the world of Spring Boot 3.0! In this section, we are going to talk about the potential that Spring Boot has for creating the most sophisticated software projects. We are going to elaborate on why Spring Boot is more than a framework but less simple. It will be your best friend in dealing with the complicated challenges of software development.

The complexity of modern software development

First, let’s clarify the complexity of modern software development. As you will know, there are lots of different challenges that arise in software projects. When we have a task or a project, we need to consider scalability, data security, orchestrating services in a cloud environment, and much more. In the old days, a developer was responsible for the code quality and performance. But now, we need to think about and cover the whole stack.

Look at modern applications. They have to adjust to the evolving dynamics of user needs, they have to leverage cloud-native capabilities and cutting-edge technologies, and they have to stay secure all the time. Doing all this, while ensuring a responsive and reliable experience for users, is not easy.

I can sense apprehension in your eyes. Don’t be afraid; we have a perfect tool to beat all these difficulties. It is a tool to help us navigate through this complicated landscape. It is a framework that simplifies development and enables developers to make strides in meeting the mentioned challenges. That tool is Spring Boot – its benefits make it a strong candidate for future projects.

Let’s now delve into why Spring Boot stands out as the framework of choice for handling advanced software projects.

The advantages of Spring Boot

This section consists of the various advantages of Spring Boot. We are going to go through these advantages and discuss how they make our lives easier and how we can use them.

Advantage 1 – rapid development

In the world of software development, time is the most crucial resource. We should get our product ready for market as soon as possible because the market is so competitive. Spring Boot offers a streamlined development experience, making it an outstanding choice for many developers. It eliminates the need for boilerplate configuration, enabling you to concentrate on writing business logic. With Spring Boot’s auto-configuration and starter dependencies, you can set up a project in minutes rather than hours. This feature alone saves a lot of time and effort, allowing developers to focus on what they do best – writing code. As you can see in Figure 1.1, just one click in Spring Initializr is enough to start developing.

Figure 1.1: Spring Initializr page

Imagine the benefits of rapid development. It means you deliver faster, get stakeholders’ feedback quicker, and implement the new change requests rapidly. Spring Boot empowers you to be agile and responsive in a competitive market.

Advantage 2 – microservice ready

As I’m sure you are aware, microservice architecture is the new age. Even when we design a Mean Valuable Product (MVP) for a small start-up idea, we are thinking in terms of a microservice structure, including asynchronous communication scalability, making it independently deployable, and ensuring flexibility. And guess which framework can help us with that? Yes, Spring Boot!

Regarding the scalability advantages of microservices, we can scale individual components of our application as needed, optimizing resource usage. Spring Boot’s support for building microservices simplifies the process, allowing you to focus on developing the core functionality of each service.

Advantage 3 – streamlined configuration

Every developer who has worked on larger or more complex projects will have faced the configuration management nightmare. Traditional approaches usually make a mess of XML files, property files, and environment-specific settings.

Spring Boot follows the “convention over configuration” philosophy, giving sensible defaults, and it provides automatic settings, which reduces the complexity of managing the settings.

Ever imagined a world where you spend less time on the tweaks in configuration files and more on actually writing code? With Spring Boot, simplicity in the configuration will lead to cleaner and more maintainable code. You can do that with Spring Boot by following best practices and avoiding unnecessary boilerplate to focus on the actual functionality of your application.

Please see the following sample XML configuration:

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
       xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
       xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
                           http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd">
    <!-- Bean Definition -->
    <bean id="myBean" class="com.example.MyBean">
        <property name="propertyName" value="value"/>
    </bean>
    <!-- Data Source Configuration -->
    <bean id="dataSource" class="org.springframework.jdbc.datasource.DriverManagerDataSource">
        <property name="driverClassName" value="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"/>
        <property name="url" value="jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/mydb"/>
        <property name="username" value="user"/>
        <property name="password" value="password"/>
    </bean>
</beans>

Introducing a service or bean in XML configuration was complicated and hard to manage, as you can see in the previous XML file. After you write your service, you need to configure it in the XML file as well.

And now we will see how easy it is in Spring Boot. You can write your class with a simple @Service annotation and it becomes a bean:

@Service
public class MyBean {
    private String propertyName = "value";
    // ...
}

And the following one is the application properties file. In the previous XML configuration, you saw that it was hard to see and manage data source properties. But in Spring Boot, we can define a data source in a YAML or properties file, as follows:

spring.datasource.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/mydb
spring.datasource.username=user
spring.datasource.password=password
spring.datasource.driver-class-name=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver

You can see how easy it is to make our code more readable and manageable.

It also promotes collaboration within the development teams through streamlined configuration. When everybody uses the same convention and has the same reliance on the auto-configuration that Spring Boot provides, it reduces the time that would be spent on understanding and working on each other’s code. It means there is consistency in doing things, which promotes efficiency besides minimizing the risk of issues arising from configurations.

Advantage 4 – extensive ecosystem

It would be great if we were all just writing code and didn’t require any integrations. But as we said in the introduction of this chapter, we’re sometimes dealing with complex projects, and all complex projects need a database, messaging between components, and interactions with external services. So, thanks to the Spring ecosystem, we can achieve these by using the libraries and projects of Spring.

As you can see in Figure 1.2, Spring is an ecosystem not just a framework, and each component is ready to communicate with each other smoothly.

Figure 1.2: Spring ecosystem

I would like to spend a little bit more time on Spring Boot’s ecosystem, which offers many tools and integrations to address these challenges comprehensively. Here’s why Spring Boot’s ecosystem is a valuable asset:

• Support for diverse databases: One of the most important features of Spring Boot is that it makes the idea of the data access to and its management of SQL as well as NoSQL databases such as MySQL and MongoDB easier. Its power of configuration facilitates an easy switch between the two, simply by changing the object’s annotation and through the Java Persistence API (JPA) data source in the properties file.
• Messaging solutions: Supporting asynchronous communication or an event-driven architecture by your application, the compatibility of Spring Boot with the likes of Apache Kafka and RabbitMQ helps a great deal with efficient message queuing as well as the effective streaming of events.
• Spring Cloud for microservices: Spring Boot provides a Spring Cloud extension, which has a suite of tools that provides developers with the ability to construct and operate microservices rapidly to operate as an application. It helps in service discovery, load balancing, and distributed configuration by using the declarative programming model.
• Cloud services integration: In the current cloud computing area, Spring Boot offers integration capabilities with the major players in this field, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and Google Cloud. This allows you to leverage the resources and services provided by these cloud providers, including storage, compute, and machine learning, in order to augment the functionality and capabilities of your applications.
• Security and authentication: The Spring Boot ecosystem has powerful security libraries that come with easy configuration for secured authentication along with authorization. Whether you want to implement OAuth 2.0 or JWT authentication or wish to apply access control based on roles, Spring Boot has this covered as well.
• Application monitoring and management: Proper application monitoring and managing are really important to keep a software application in a healthy state. Spring Boot Actuator, being an associated subproject of Spring Boot, provides built-in support for metrics gathering, health-check features, and management endpoints, and it is not difficult to add its functionality to your services.
• Third-party integrations: Apart from core functions, Spring Boot offers smooth integration with a whole array of third-party libraries and frameworks. Whether you want to integrate with some specific technology stack or special-purpose library, mostly you will find the Spring Boot extension or integration that fits the case.

By using the wide ecosystem of Spring Boot, the software development processes can be made quicker, fewer obstacles at various integration levels are encountered, and access to a wide pool of tools and resources is possible. The ecosystem provided by Spring Boot is highly flexible and versatile for enhancing the development process amid the ever-dynamic environment around the development of software.

Advantage 5 – cloud-native capabilities

Now, let’s see how Spring Boot best fits into cloud-native development. When we are speaking of cloud-native, in reality, we are referring to applications that are designed for cloud environments such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Spring Boot has got great features such as scalability and elasticity for applications in such environments, which means our application will grow or shrink horizontally as per demand, plus we get access to multiple managed services.

Want to build your application using Spring Boot and deploy it on the cloud? The good news is that Spring Boot encapsulates all the configuration details, hence making the deployment process on the cloud very simple. It has been designed to work smoothly with cloud environments. This means you can easily bind your application to the various cloud services that providers offer. Such services could span databases and storage solutions all the way to identity management systems.

One of the advantages that comes with using Spring Boot for cloud-native applications is adaptability. Whether you go with the public cloud, private cloud, or some mix of both – which we call hybrid environments – Spring Boot provides a simplified experience. There are never concerns about complexities associated with the manual configurations of this. The cloud-native capabilities within Spring Boot put you in a position to make optimal use of the abilities available today across cloud computing.

This means adjusting the application’s scaling up or down based on some ongoing situation at a particular point in time. For example, you want to create an application that will automatically scale its resources upon the sudden increase of its users – this will involve cloud-native development in Spring Boot and deployment in the Cloud Foundry. In this situation, Spring Boot is the bridge because it takes care of your application and ensures it stays functional with full utilization of what has been provided in the cloud environment. It will make your development process effective and efficient and ensure you develop applications that are more resilient to deploy.

Advantage 6 – testing made easy

Now, we will discuss the importance of testing in software development and how Spring Boot aids with this massive process. As you will know, it is very important to test sufficiently in order to ensure that our software is reliable and behaving as expected. I’m sure you will be well familiar with the reasons why testing is so important – we have to catch bugs and issues before our software goes live.

Spring Boot really promotes testing and has a lot of tools and conventions to make this possible. That ensures not only saving time in the long run but also a better product for our users. Spring Boot perfectly suits this approach, being all about “testing first.” This approach drives us to consider testing with every step of development, and not as an afterthought.

Now then, how does Spring Boot help us test? One nice thing about it is that it’s flexible, so it doesn’t introduce various testing frameworks, which would create compatibility issues. Whether you prefer JUnit, TestNG, or any other popular testing tools, with Spring Boot, any of these tools can be easily integrated into the workflow. This way, you can decide on the tools you would be comfortable with using and Spring Boot will not restrict your choice.

Moreover, Spring Boot doesn’t limit you to just one type of testing. It lets you write different kinds of tests – from unit tests that verify the correctness of a small piece of code to integration tests that verify that different parts of your application communicate well among themselves, and even end-to-end tests that simulate how a user will journey through your application. The idea here is to equip you with all those tools and flexibility, in order to test your application at any level in depth.

In a nutshell, Spring Boot equips you with everything that makes your testing efficient and effective. It’s like having a toolkit where each tool is made to address a specific testing need, making your software robust and reliable. Remember that good testing is one of the key elements of quality software development, and Spring Boot stands to guide you through it.

Advantage 7 – active development

Let’s now discuss Spring Boot and its compatibility in the fast-progressing world of technology.

In software development, keeping up with the times is essential due to the rapid growth of technology. This is where Spring Boot comes into play, being a dynamic framework that is growing with time. In addition, it is actively being developed by a community who are dedicated to adding new features as well as maximizing secure applications. With the help of Spring Boot, you can interact with the latest technology trends, such as newer Java versions or containerization technologies, without starting over each time. This framework continues to change with the industry, to keep your development journey up to date and even closer to the modern progressive foundation upon which your project is built. In the tech world, where everything is constantly changing, Spring Boot works as a handy up-to-date guide empowering you to remain ahead.

Advantage 8 – community-driven plugins

Let us understand the community of Spring Boot. It’s like a big family where every person has a common goal. People from all over the world have created lots of add-ons and extras for Spring Boot, making it even better. It is somewhat like having a huge toolbox with the ideal tool for every job.

In that toolbox, there are plugins to serve each purpose. Need to connect to a database or put up a messaging system? There is a plugin for that. Want to make your app more secure or easier to deploy? There is a plugin for that, too. And the best part? These plugins have been tried and tested by a lot of people, so they are perfected.

Using these thorough, community-made plugins means that you don’t have to start from scratch every time and can skip wasting time making something that has already been made. With these plugins, you are able to build faster and join the worldwide team of developers sharing their knowledge and tools. In this way, all of the developers can build cooler stuff faster.

After discussing the foundational benefits of Spring Boot, we will now start learning about its latest version.

Embracing the new era – the innovations of Spring Boot 3.0

Spring Boot 3.0 marks an important part of the story of advanced Java application development. Let’s explore what this new topic holds.

Java 17 baseline

Aligning Spring Boot 3.0 to Java 17 gives you the freshest developments in the Java universe. Generally, features such as sealed classes and new APIs in Java 17, among other things, improve the code readability and maintainability. Using Java 17 with Spring Boot means working with a version that not only is the latest but also has extended support from Java. This gives you cleaner code as well as better performance while being ahead in technology. With Java 17, many new features have been introduced – here is a simple example using sealed classes:

public sealed class Animal permits Dog, Cat, Rabbit {
    // class body
}
final class Dog extends Animal {
    // class body
}
final class Cat extends Animal {
    // class body
}
final class Rabbit extends Animal {
    // class body
}

This feature allows you to control which classes or interfaces can extend or implement a particular class or interface. This feature is particularly useful for maintaining code integrity and preventing unintended subclasses.

GraalVM support

GraalVM’s support within Spring Boot 3.0 is an important feature, particularly for cloud-native solutions. When we have a task to develop a serverless project, Java is usually not the first option. This is because Java projects need some more time on startup and consume more memory than other development languages. But GraalVM support helps Spring Boot, reducing memory usage and cutting down on startup times. For microservices and serverless architectures, this means achieving a level of efficiency that allows for quicker scaling and optimized resource utilization.

Observability with Micrometer

Let’s talk about an exciting feature in Spring Boot 3.0 – the integration of Micrometer. Imagine Micrometer as a tool that makes us aware of what is going on inside our application just by taking a look at logs, metrics, and traces. With Micrometer Tracing, the Micrometer tool becomes even more useful within Spring Boot. Now we are able to record application metrics more effectively and carry out more effective operation traces. It’s like having a fancier way to check how well our application is executing with the current technology, way better than the old ways we used to rely on, especially when we’re working with applications built by compiled native code.

Jakarta EE 10 compatibility

I am going to try and explain the transition to Jakarta EE 10 in Spring Boot 3.0. So, it’s a bit like updating your GPS with the latest maps and features before setting off on your journey. In a similar way, the shift to Jakarta EE 10 enables us to make use of the latest tools and standards available in enterprise Java. This way, we would be able to ensure that all applications built make use of modern standards and are future-proof as well. This update doesn’t just keep our applications up to date but also enables us to work with other, more advanced technologies, compliant with the new standards. So, this is nothing less than a leap forward in our development journey.

Simplified MVC framework

The MVC framework updates in Spring Boot 3.0 improve the way we manage communications, particularly API error handling. Support for RFC7807 (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7807) means our applications can handle exceptions in one place. The following code sample illustrates how to handle exceptions in one place:

@RestControllerAdvice
public class GlobalExceptionHandler extends ResponseEntityExceptionHandler {
  @ExceptionHandler(Exception.class)
  public ResponseEntity<ProblemDetail> handleException(Exception ex, WebRequest request) {
    ProblemDetail problemDetail = new ProblemDetail();
    problemDetail.setTitle("Internal Server Error");
    problemDetail.setDetail(ex.getMessage());
    problemDetail.setStatus(HttpStatus.INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR.value());
    return new ResponseEntity<>(problemDetail, HttpStatus.INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR);
  }
  @ExceptionHandler(ResourceNotFoundException.class)
  public ResponseEntity<ProblemDetail> handleResourceNotFoundException(ResourceNotFoundException ex, WebRequest request) {
    ProblemDetail problemDetail = new ProblemDetail();
    problemDetail.setTitle("Resource Not Found");
    problemDetail.setDetail(ex.getMessage());
    problemDetail.setStatus(HttpStatus.NOT_FOUND.value());
    return new ResponseEntity<>(problemDetail, HttpStatus.NOT_FOUND);
  }
  // other exception handlers
}

In this example, GlobalExceptionHandler is a @ControllerAdvice class that handles all exceptions thrown by the application. It has an @ExceptionHandler method for each type of exception that the application can throw. Each @ExceptionHandler method returns a ResponseEntity with a ProblemDetail object as the body and an appropriate HTTP status code. The ProblemDetail object contains the details of the error, including a title, detail, and status code.

Enhanced Kotlin support

Kotlin is getting popular among developers. If you feel more confident with Kotlin, Spring Boot 3.0 now offers enhanced support for Kotlin. This support expands the Spring community.

Wrapping up – why Spring Boot 3.0 is your advanced project ally

In the preceding sections, we saw how Spring Boot is a powerful tool for developing big and advanced software projects with its quick development. With Spring Boot, we are talking about drastically reducing development time and effort with its “convention over configuration” setup. What does this mean? More time to develop, less time required for setup and configurations.

Well, let us now talk about how it can be adapted for microservices. Spring Boot is a way to not only facilitate development but also make your applications more scalable and efficient. And, with the new microservice architecture on the rise, this becomes essential. It allows you to break your application down into smaller, more manageable, and fully independent entities that perfectly cooperate as a whole.

Another aspect that we discussed is dealing with a streamlined configuration. The auto-configuration feature of Spring Boot replaces the handling of manual configurations, which may be very boring. This is very significant since dealing with large-scale projects where configuration can grow is a very complex and time-consuming undertaking.

We’ve also touched on the ecosystem that Spring Boot provides. This ecosystem offers a range of plugins and tools. This environment puts at your fingertips everything you need to build, test, and deploy high-standard applications.

The cloud-native abilities make Spring Boot a framework of choice in serverless application development. Given the fact that there is an increasing migration toward cloud environments, this ability has become more critical.

In the end, it is all about ongoing development and support of the community. An active community and constant development align Spring Boot with the latest technologies and trends. This makes this software a lasting and future-proof option for handling complex projects.

Now is the time to advance your development narrative with Spring Boot 3.0.

As we progress through this book, we’ll go deeper into the world of Spring Boot. We’ll examine various architectural patterns, reactive programming, data management, testing, security, containerization, and event-driven systems. In each chapter, you will gain practical experience and come closer to success in your real-world projects.