Spring Bootifing older applications

[Luca Botti]

Is it possible to maintain both the Java Configuration and the web.xml configuration?

This would apply to the following situation:

An older, in built framework but with a newer, Spring Boot based REST api implementation.

Regards

[Craig Walls]

I get that question a lot. In short, yes you can take an existing, manually configured Spring app and "boot-ify" it. However, I cannot say what the steps would be or how difficult it will be because it really depends on the quality and structure of the app you're attempting to introduce Spring Boot into. In an ideal situation, you'd add a few Spring Boot starter deps to your build (possibly replacing some that are already there) and enable auto configuration and your app would still work; then you would be able to start gradually removing some of your hand-written configuration and it would still work. Eventually, you'd remove most/all of the hand-written config and the app would be completely boot-ified.

But again, the results will vary depending on the app in question. I can't say with any certainty that it will be easy for any given app.

[Luca Botti]

Hi Craig,

thanks for your answer. Would it be possible to define a spring-boot context interpreting a web.xml? do you think the effort would be of some value? This way you could maintain a standard web.xml for, e.g., deployment on a Weblogic instance while having (agile) development on spring-boot.

This i just the case I have, doing some consulting work which introduces spring boot to a weblogic production environment. I am aware of (and used) what is described in documentation about deployment to App servers, but I am not allowed to migrate all the configuration to a java based class.

Regards