Spring in Action - Where does Spring need attention or growth?

[R.J. Salicco]

Spring does a lot of things and it does most of them well (great in my world). In your opinion, where does Spring need attention or where do you foresee a large potential for growth within the framework?

[Craig Walls]

I'm not sure how to reply to this, because typically Spring is ahead of me when it comes to addressing needs. I don't often encounter a case of "I wish Spring did X." because if I do, then I tend to find out that it actually does already and I didn't know that.

That said, I can think of two areas that it is currently growing in that are interesting:

- Containerization: As of Spring Boot 2.3, Spring Boot has some awesome suppose for building your Spring application into Docker images, which can then be deployed in (among other places) a Kubernetes cluster. This is really good stuff and it's relatively easy to do (see the "music video" I made about it at https://youtu.be/xUBPh1qAJms). That said, I think there's still opportunity here for improvement and definitely some opportunity for tighter integration with Kubernetes for things like consuming ConfigMap properties, service discovery, etc. The Spring Cloud Kubernetes project is already addressing some of this, but there's still room to grow.
- Native images: In the interest of squeezing every bit of performance from startup, to memory footprint, to distributable size, there has been some really good work done recently to enable native images of Spring applications. There's still work to be done, but what's taken place thus far has been rather impressive. I don't want to give away spoilers, but there's at least one talk I know about at SpringOne (https://springone.io/2020/sessions/the-path-towards-spring-boot-native-applications) next week to show off some of the latest stuff in this space.

[R.J. Salicco]

Craig - thank you for the response. Totally agree with what you said - I rarely find myself in a place with Spring where I am saying, "why does Spring not work with x?".

Great to hear about the containerization items and I have an interest in the Spring Cloud Kubernetes project and will check things out.

I enjoyed your Webinar the other day with the NFJS crew.

Thanks again.

[Claude Moore]

R.J. Salicco wrote:Craig - thank you for the response. Totally agree with what you said - I rarely find myself in a place with Spring where I am saying, "why does Spring not work with x?".

Great to hear about the containerization items and I have an interest in the Spring Cloud Kubernetes project and will check things out.

I enjoyed your Webinar the other day with the NFJS crew.

Thanks again.

If i can add my tow cents, I think that there's a weak point - batch processing. I know that there's Spring Batch Framework, but it seems to me that it's kind a topic that has been left behind the fast growth in other areas Spring used to have.