Detroit Labs developers, Janani Subbiah and Bryan Kelly, talk about how we’ve taken advantage of Spring Boot to speed up the process of creating apps.
Some people have a misconception that Spring is outdated, but we love it. Here’s a list of some of our favorite things about Spring Boot.
- Minimal configuration is required to start a new ReSTful app
- Convention over configuration: You can decrease the number of decisions that a developer using the framework is required to make without necessarily losing flexibility
- There is a Spring library for almost all your needs (incorporating security, database access, writing documentation, etc.)
- Spring keeps up to date with technology (e.g. Kotlin support, support for functions as a service, etc.)
- Spring Boot makes development and managing services in a microservice architecture very easy (Spring provides libraries like spring-cloud-config, spring-service-registry, spring-stream, etc., that help with connecting and managing a suite of microservices)
- The Spring blog is pretty fantastic — Josh Long (who is an advocate for Spring and I think is also in the core Spring team) owns “This Week in Spring,” a once-a-week blog post on all happenings in Spring world that is pretty good)
- Pivotal (the company that sponsors Spring) also provides a platform as a service (the software and tooling required to host services to things like Amazon Web Services) called Pivotal Cloud Foundry that comes with a lot of support for Spring apps
- They do A TON of social events: SpringOne series across the globe, Josh Long can be found speaking at a LOT of conferences every year, and they also have a podcast now!
- Spring Boot not only makes development of services easy, but also uses good/extensible programming patterns (e.g. they use automatic configuration of properties required by your app/project, and it is possible to create your own autoconfiguration based on the pattern they use.)
- Maybe not a big deal, but the Spring team has a strong Twitter and Stack Overflow presence.