Spring Framework 5 is a major release of Pivotal’s framework and along with Spring Boot, Spring Data and Spring Cloud, it’s proving to be the Swiss Knife for delivering microservices. It has lots of features ready to use out of the box, is simple, fast, and efficient and doesn’t have a learning curve of months. Most importantly, Spring has dedicated a lot of effort to delivering features that can be deployed in the cloud, on AWS, Azure or GCP and provides lots of support – which is music to Godel developers’ ears, as so much of our work is either moving or developing our clients’ applications in the cloud.

Launched 15 years ago as a simplified alternative to J2EE development, Spring fast became popular as a lightweight alternative to often over-complicated J2EE solutions. Now it delivers over 20 projects under one roof including Spring Boot, Spring Cloud and Spring Kafka. A key element is an infrastructural support at the application level focusing on the ‘plumbing’ of enterprise solutions so that teams can focus on application-level business logic, without unnecessary ties to specific deployment environments. It minimises cumbersome steps in the development process and is designed to allow developers to spend more time writing code and less time navigating complex IT systems.

What makes Spring Framework 5 special?

This latest release has been four years in the making and is probably the most significant release of Spring Framework so far. It offers the developer community the freedom to choose the right stack for the right job. Choosing between reactive programming and traditional blocking style or imperative development is a nuanced decision, but with the advent of Spring Framework 5, the choice is yours. It is now possible to combine the approaches – flexibility is the most important thing behind this framework and it delivers on its promise. Undoubtedly these attributes are contributing to the growth of Spring Framework and its growth is the reason that we use it as de facto for Java development at Godel.

According to Zero Turnaround’s Java Tools and Technologies Landscape report 2016, Spring is dominant with 43% of respondents in its survey stating they use Spring MVC, and 29% stating they use Spring Boot. Spring Boot makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring-based applications that are easy to ‘just run’. It takes an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries so development can get started with minimum fuss. Most Spring Boot applications need very little Spring configuration and once again it is the most popular framework for microservices development, and due to the nature of Uber JAR, is one of the most cloud/container friendly too. The Zero Turnaround Java Web Frameworks index also places Spring MVC and Spring Boot, in first and third places respectively.

If you’d like to know more about developing microservices with Java tools, please contact  Aliaksandr Karymau.