Craig Walls

What's new in Spring?

8:30 AM MDT

It was over 10 years ago that Spring hit the scene and made a big impact in the enterprise Java development ecosystem. Now that Spring 4.2 is available (and Spring 5 on the way), there's a lot of new features and a lot that you may not know about yet.

Whether you're already working with Spring 4 or are anxious to make a move up, there's plenty of new tricks Spring has in store for you. We'll explore them all in this overview of everything that's new in Spring.

Spring Rebooted

10:30 AM MDT

In this session, we'll see how to build real Spring applications using Spring Boot. We'll also look under the covers to see what makes Spring Boot tick.

Spring offers a number of configuration options: XML configuration, Java configuration, and Groovy configuration to name a few. To some degree, component-scanning and autowiring help eliminate some explicit configuration. But in general most Spring applications require some essential “bootstrap” configuration to enable key functionality. What's the right way to build Spring applications when there are so many choices?

What if I told you that configuration was optional?

Spring Boot is an exciting new programming model for Spring that makes it extremely easy to create stand-alone, production-ready Spring applications. Rather than writing lots of code to satisfy the needs of a framework, Spring Boot helps you focus your coding efforts on your application. Spring Boot takes an opinionated approach to configuring Spring, making it possible to create Spring applications with little or, in some cases, no Spring configuration at all!

Spring Testing Rebooted

1:30 PM MDT

How do you test a Spring application? The easy answer is that Spring encourages loose-coupling through interfaces and dependency injection, therefore it's easy to inject mock implementations at test time.

But, as I said, that's the easy answer.

There's more to testing an application than simple unit-testing. And the most challenging parts of an application to test are the external edges such as the web and database portions. It's difficult to inject a mock user into a web application; and injecting a mock database doesn't give any confidence that persistence code will work with a real database.

In this session, we'll look at various ways that Spring and Spring Boot help with testing the tough-to-test portions of an application.

Cloudy with a chance of Spring Boot

3:15 PM MDT

You wouldn't write your entire application in a single main() method or servlet. Nor would you develop an entire production-ready application in a single class. It's even unlikely that you'd cram everything into a single package.

Modularity helps us gain order in our code, breaking it into easily digestible, refactorable, pluggable, and testable chunks. Classes and methods are a form of modularity that we're all familiar with. But once the code is built, modularity goes away and we're left deploying a single WAR file.

Aside from being buzzword-compliant, Microservices are a means of defining entire systems from composable, but distinct deployment units gaining all of the benefits of finer-grained modularity. As it turns out, Spring is well-equipped as the platform on which we can build and deploy microservices.

In this session, we'll examine the details of microservices and explore the features of Spring, Spring Boot, and Spring Cloud that enable you to achieve modularity via microservices.