Spring in Action: Underrated spring modules?

[Matt Dalen]

Hi, Craig,

Thanks for answering questions!  I was wondering: Spring has a lot of different interlocking pieces, which make it easy (relatively) for people to pick and choose what they need. What’s the most underrated module, that people don’t really know about, in your opinion?

[Craig Walls]

That's hard to answer given that I don't know what modules are overlooked by others. I only know which modules I tend to forget about.

Obviously, Spring MVC is perhaps the least overlooked module in Spring. Virtually every project uses it (or Spring WebFlux if they've gone reactive). So that's not going to make my list of the most overlooked.

But if I had to pick what might be the most overlooked (again, based on my own experience of tending to forget about them), I'd say:

- Spring Statemachine - The name kinda says it all...provides statemachine concepts in a Spring way.
- Spring Session - Manage and share session information across nodes in a common backend (like Redis).
- Spring REST Docs - Generate Asciidoc templates for your REST APIs based on results of running tests.

Even then, these come to mind from time to time. I've even done a little work with Spring REST Docs recently, so it's not entirely forgotten.

[Tim Holloway]

Here's a good rule to follow:

1. If you need to use an API, see if there's a Spring Module that supports and enhances that API.

2. If you need something that doesn't have an API, see if there's a Spring Module for it anyway.