Spring I/O 2016 Highlights
13 December 202106 June 2016 | Software
A delegation of six Java engineers attended this year’s edition of Spring I/O, the largest European conference on Spring, held in Barcelona between the 19th and the 20th of May. The event included two days of keynotes, presentations and workshops on the most recent and upcoming developments in the Spring Framework. I am happy to be sharing below some takeaways from the conference.
The event kicked off by emphasizing the upcoming changes to Spring Boot 1.4 GA (i.e. General Availability), such as error page prevention (e.g. 404.html), constructor injection without @Autowired, Caffeine cache, better test support, all paving the way for the new release of Spring Framework 5.
Here are some of the expected highlights of Spring Framework 5:
- It will bring Reactive Support through Project Reactor and will compile against JDK9, in spite of JDK9 planned GA release of March 2017;
- Spring Framework 5 is scheduled to go GA in December 2016, while Spring Framework 4 will get into maintenance mode for 4 years and Spring Framework 3 will no longer be maintained (it already completed its 4 year maintenance releases support);
- Http/2 will become common thing with the adoption of Tomcat/Jetty/Undertow/Netty native http/2 support;
- Project Web Reactive will be included in the Spring master branch soon.
Regarding the workshops, we enjoyed a presentation held by Oliver Gierke who talked about DDD & Rest – Domain Driven APIs for the Web. I am a fan of the Spring Data project and I love the power and flexibility that it gives you. The most complicated aspect of large software projects is not the implementation, but the real world domain that the software serves. For those interested to find out more about the subject, the presentation is available here.
We also attended a presentation delivered by Michael Plod, who talked about Caching With Spring: Advanced Topics and Best Practices and one on Shaping The Future of Testing on the JVM held by Sam Brannen from Junit5, where we had the opportunity to see bits of new features of Spring.
The second day continued with reactive, reactive and more reactive.
“From Imperative to Reactive”, a workshop held by Rossen Stoyanchev caught our attention with some interesting perspectives, such as the way in which the Reactor project will impact Spring’s Core and how a repository (Spring data) will look like. We had the opportunity to ask him a couple of questions and found out that they will provide reactive streams support for web-sockets and the netty support on Spring Boot will become more popular in future Boot releases.
The conference ended with the Living on the Edge (Service): Bundling Microservices to Optimize Consumption for Devices with Spring Cloud & Netflix OSS presentation, held by Mark Heckler. He showed us around the Spring Cloud stack Zuul, Config Server, Eureka, Hystrix. We already know our way around Spring Cloud, but it is always nice to validate that one is on the right track.
All in all, the main takeaway from the entire conference for anyone working with Spring is to prepare the codebase for Reactive and start using Http2, if not doing it yet.
The conference was definitely worth attending and is a recommendation for anyone considering it in the future. We wish we could have cloned ourselves to participate at all the talks and workshops.
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Sabin
