Spring custodian Pivotal Software has released Spring Boot 1.2.1, less than one month after their 1.2.0 release. Introduced early last year after 18 months in development, Spring Boot is Spring's convention over configuration offering for bootstrapping Spring based projects.
InfoQ spoke to Spring Boot co-creator Phil Webb about the release and Spring Boot in general.
InfoQ: How have you seen the adoption of Spring Boot among Spring developers?
Webb: The adoption of Spring Boot has been great. Obviously, being an open source project, we don't have precise usage figures but the anecdotal evidence shows that lots of people have tried and enjoyed using Spring Boot. One of the earlier design decisions that we took was to support both classic WAR deployments and embedded Servlet containers. That really turned out to be a fortuitous decision because as well as appealing to "green field" development we're also seeing a lot of people converting existing applications. It's very satisfying to hear that people have converted projects and been able to delete code.
InfoQ: What were your big themes of the Spring Boot 1.2 release Spring Boot seems to have included support for many standards in v1.2 including many from Java EE?
Webb: The big themes for Spring Boot 1.2 were moving to Servlet 3.1, adding support for JTA (using either Bitronix or Atomikos) and generally improving the Spring Boot experience when deploying to a Java EE Application Server. We've also added lots and lots of small improvements, most of which were identified or contributed by the community. This blog post provides a good overview.
InfoQ: Is this a sign of how close the Java EE and Spring worlds are today?
Webb: I've always found the Spring vs Java EE debates to somewhat counterproductive. I was a user of Spring and Java EE before joining Pivotal and as a regular developer I just wanted to get work done. I'd use whatever library or technology solved my problem, I really didn't care about where it came from. With Spring Boot we've tried to listen to what our users want and integrate with popular technologies, no matter who created them. There are many great Java EE technologies, and fortunately most of them are also designed to work just as well outside of an application server; integration is really a no brainer. Josh Long has written an excellent article about Java EE support in Spring Boot which goes into a lot more detail on the subject. One thing that I do like about Spring Boot is that it's able to go beyond the "standards" and use great projects such as Jackson, Flyway, Elasticsearch and Thymeleaf (to name but a few). Java developers really are spoilt for choice when it comes to quality open source libraries.
InfoQ: What are your plans for the future of Spring Boot?
Webb: We'll sit down as a team to discuss 1.3 early in the new year. I'm personally quite interested to see if we can do more to help when it comes to packaging Spring Boot applications. There have been quite a few blog posts this year about using Spring Boot with Docker; making that process easier would definitely be nice. There is also the new "Spring Cloud" project which is taking a lot of the Netflix technologies and making them more accessible to Spring developers. We're obviously going to do all we can to support that project.
For more information please refer to the Spring Boot website and documentation.