How Spring Boot Accelerates the Development of Microservices and REST APIs

Spring Boot has become “developer’s best friend” for anyone working with Java in a cloud environment. Spring Boot is a framework which is known for providing basic functionality for a wide range of features, including but not limited to:

• Logging
• Resource Handling
• Dependency Injection
• REST API Creation
• Object-JSON Conversion
• Database Communication
• Microservice Communication
• Auto-scaling
• Unit Testing

However, what makes it special is its ability to streamline development using these features. In this article, we will discuss what Spring Boot is and how it implements these core features to save developers time and effort. This is the beginning of a series of articles about microservice architecture.

Where did Spring Boot come from?

Spring Boot is derived from the Spring framework, which provides many of the core features described above. Spring was first released in 2002 when hosting web services was much different than you see in modern cloud environments. There were many more files which needed to be configured, you only had a single software instance (in most cases), and there were possible restrictions based on your web host.

Spring Boot was built to restructure Spring for cloud environments where many of these issues are not present. For example, there is no need for a web.xml file within your host directory. However, this would be required by legacy web hosts where Spring would be used. Cloud environments also create the ability for auto-scaling multiple instances of a web service, so Spring Boot was built with this in mind too.

When people say Spring Boot means rapid development, they mean rapid. If your operations are simple, it is possible to create a microservice with a REST API, runtime logic, and database connection within an hour. If you were to use old school Spring, it may have taken you an hour to simply configure your files.

Which Spring Boot features make development so rapid?

There are many things that make development with Spring Boot faster than other frameworks. After all, rapid development is the key goal of Spring Boot.

Project Generation

The first groundbreaking feature of Spring Boot is the project creation process. Instead of creating your own Maven or Gradle project for your Spring Boot microservice, you can have one generated for you using the Spring Initializr tool. The tool is simple to use; just enter your project settings (e.g. name, domain) and select any Spring Boot extensions which may be needed for your project. Any selected extensions will have their dependencies automatically imported into your project’s pom.xml or gradle.build file. When you are comfortable with your project settings, you can download the pre-formatted source files.

REST APIS

Another key feature of Spring Boot is the ability to develop REST APIs. Since Spring Boot has the ability to automatically convert between Java objects and JSON, development of REST APIs is simple. Through the use of only a few Java annotations, you can define a REST endpoint URI, the Java method to handle logic, and request/response body structure. For the request body structure, you may define a Java object to align with the fields of the request. Spring Boot will automatically convert the request into your object. The same is true for the response; the response body will reflect the fields of the Java object which is returned. In a later article we will dig into the code and explain how this works.

Services

Services are another feature of Spring Boot which aide in the rapid development of microservices. Services are singleton instances which are usually created to handle a certain event, object, or object group. Services should represent most of the business logic within your Spring Boot application. Services serve as a way to decouple logic from interfaces such as the outside world (REST API) and database. This decoupling significantly reduces the amount of “spaghetti code” in your projects.

Database Communication

Like REST APIs and services, database communication in Spring Boot can be defined through Java annotations. Spring Boot provides more than a few ways to communicate with a database through Java source code. One of the most popular methods is to create a Java class which has fields correlating to columns of a database table. For example, a Java class named Person could represent a Person table in the database with fields tracking name, phone number, etc. Each instance of this class represents a record in the Person table.

Wrapping Up

We haven’t even touched the surface of what Spring Boot has to offer, but you should have a general understanding of its benefits and features. In future articles, we will delve into source code to understand how each of Spring Boot’s core components can be used.

You should now be aware of how Spring Boot evolved from Spring to provide a more rapid approach to developing services in cloud architecture. This was done by allowing auto-scaling, reducing file configurations, creating a project generator, and implementing an API through Java annotations. We also discussed the (arguably) most important core features of Spring Boot, including REST APIS, services, and database communication.

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