Somnath Musib - Spring Boot in Practice

Somnath Musib

Foreword by Josh Long

To comment go to liveBook

Manning

Shelter Island

For more information on this and other Manning titles go to

www.manning.com

For online information and ordering of these and other Manning books, please visit www.manning.com. The publisher offers discounts on these books when ordered in quantity.

For more information, please contact

Special Sales Department

Manning Publications Co.

20 Baldwin Road

PO Box 761

Shelter Island, NY 11964

Email: orders@manning.com

2022 by Manning Publications Co. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the publisher.

Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in the book, and Manning Publications was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in initial caps or all caps.

Recognizing the importance of preserving what has been written, it is Mannings policy to have the books we publish printed on acid-free paper, and we exert our best efforts to that end. Recognizing also our responsibility to conserve the resources of our planet, Manning books are printed on paper that is at least 15 percent recycled and processed without the use of elemental chlorine.

ISBN: 9781617298813

To my parentsfor sacrificing everything to raise us

and

To my son, Abhirupfor adding new meaning and purpose to my life

I remember sitting with cloud luminaries and colleagues, James Watters and Andrew Clay Shafer, in a caf in Santa Monica, California in 2015. We were at a crossroads. The Spring team had launched Spring Boot in 2013, and it was generally available in 2014. And in 2015, it was taking off. We knew people were excited about the possibilities, and we knew people were embracing it, but we also knew we hadnt quite gotten there. It was too big to know when or where there was. I still dont know if we know. It is early 2022 as I write this, and the project is growing day by day. I still dont know if we know where there is.

We might be on to something, we agreed. Indeed.

I still dont know if were there, of course. But I do know that to get there, we need people to be on the same page and familiar with the landscape. You cant find your way around without proper orientation. This book, Spring Boot in Practice, gives me hope. It avoids the vertigo typical of most attempts to scale the rock face that is server-side application and service development by offering a steady hand.

The book almost immediately gets right into the business of building an application straight out of the gate. First, theres a quick primer on the fundamentals, and then boom, youre building something! I think thats the best way, too. With something this big, you just have to start exploring. It wont matter how much, or in what detail, I try to describe the place or even depict it cartographically; its just not the same. You need to see it; you need to explore the space!

After the primer, it feels like were working our way up the conceptual ladder, starting with the foundational stuff you will deal with when building any Spring Boot-based application. Then, we get into data access, the Spring Boot observability support through the Spring Boot Actuator support, securing your applications with Spring Security, and building HTTP services with Spring MVC and Spring Webflux. If you get this far, you wont know every nook and cranny, but youll know where to go. Youll be correctly oriented.

Where you go next is anybodys guess, but author Somnath Musib does a good job here, as well, charting out some newer neighborhoods in the wide and wonderful world of Springdom, including Kotlin, GraphQL, and GraalVM. Kotlin is an ever-changing and vibrant language that maps nicely to the Spring ecosystem. Spring GraphQL is a brand-new project that brings the GraphQL Java project to the Spring developer. And Spring Native is a fantastic way to turn Spring Boot 2.x and Spring Framework 5.x code into GraalVM native images. Both Spring GraphQL and Spring Native are relatively new projects, so I am delighted to see them covered here in this book, your reliable guide to Spring.

Somnath Musib does a great job navigating the area, and his guidance no doubt makes it easier to focus on the journey that matters: the journey to production. When you enjoy success in production, when youre there, I hope you too can look at your friends and colleagues and say, smiling, We might be on to something.

Josh Long, Spring Developer Advocate, Tanzu, a division of VMWare, @starbuxman

As of the writing of this book, Spring Boot is the most popular Java framework, and it is way ahead in its usage and acceptance from its competitor frameworks, such as Dropwizard, Quarkus, and Micronaut. With the industry-wide adoption of microservice-based architecture, the popularity of Spring Boot is skyrocketing, and it has become the most preferred Java framework to learn amongst the developers.

Despite its popularity, the biggest challenge newcomers come across is knowing where to start. Both Spring and Spring Boot reference documentation is humongous and not beginner friendly. Spring Boot provides several guides on how to do certain things with Spring Boot. These guides are good for a quick start but fail to provide practical examples and a comprehensive understanding of the capabilities of Spring Boot. There are numerous tutorials, articles, and blog posts available across the internet. But again, those are scattered, incomplete, and far from providing a complete picture of Spring Boot.

Spring Boot in Practice attempts to address many of these issues. When we started working on the book, we had two major goals. The first was to provide our readers with a clear picture of Spring Boot and its many internal concepts, such as autoconfiguration, actuator, and security. The second was to enrich the readers learning journey with practical examples of Spring Boot, rather than traditional textbook-style, theory-oriented examples. We are confident that we have kept ourselves focused on these two goals.