Pivotal recently released updates of their Spring Boot project to versions 1.3.8 and 1.4.1.
Version 1.3.8 features 35 bux fixes and dependency upgrades such as Spring Framework, Spring Data, Jetty, and Tomcat.
Version 1.4.1, the first maintenance release since version 1.4, features over 150 bug fixes and dependency upgrades such as Spring Integration, Hibernate, Jackson, and Hazelcast.
New features in version 1.4 include:
- Startup failure messages
- Convention based error messages
- Extended data support
- Banner images
Startup Failure Messages
A new FailureAnalyzer interface intercepts exceptions and converts them to human-readable diagnostic messages. For example, the following error message will be displayed when a Spring Boot application tries to use a port already in use:
New for version 1.4.1 is a NoSuchBeanDefinitionException instance of FailureAnalyzer that intercepts an exception of a Spring bean not found:
Developers can also implement their own instances of the FailureAnalyzer interface.
Convention Based Error Messages
Custom HTML error messages can be written to intercept HTTP status codes for display on a website. For example, 404.html (rendered page shown below) placed in /src/main/resources/public/error will handle an HTTP 404 status code.
Banner Images
By default, all Spring applications display an ASCII art Spring logo on startup. Spring Boot now allows for custom startup banners by converting any image in *.jpg, *gif, and *.png to ASCII art. The filename must start with banner.* and be placed in the folder, /src/main/resources. For example, as shown below, the standard Java logo was auto-generated to ASCII art.
An example Spring Boot application can be found on GitHub.
Path Forward
The Spring Boot team plans a version 1.5 release by the end of 2016 that will include pull requests that couldn’t be completed before version 1.4. Spring Boot 2.0 is planned to be fully integrated with Spring Framework 5 and will require Java 8.
Resources
Spring developers, Phil Webb, Stéphane Nicoll, and Josh Long, presented a Spring Boot keynote at a recent SpringOne conference.
More Spring Boot examples can be found at Spring’s GitHub repository.
