Spring in Action

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As the Taco Cloud application grows, you’ll fill in this barebones project structure with Java code, images, stylesheets, tests, and other collateral that will make your project more complete. But in the meantime, let’s dig a little deeper into a few of the items that Spring Initializr provided. But enough of this chitchat, yakety-yak, and flimflam. This book’s title includes the phrase in action, so let’s get moving, and you can start writing your first application with Spring. 1.2. Initializing a Spring application Finally, to my beautiful wife Raymie, the love of my life, my sweetest dream, and my inspiration: Thank you for your encouragement and for putting up with another book project. And to my sweet and wonderful girls, Maisy and Madi: I am so proud of you and of the amazing young ladies you are becoming. I love all of you more than you can imagine or I can possible express. About this book

You’ll find several options for initializing a Spring application. Although I could walk you through the steps of manually creating a project directory structure and defining a build specification, that’s wasted time—time better spent writing application code. Therefore, you’re going to lean on the Spring Initializr to bootstrap your application. Automatic configuration has its roots in the Spring techniques known as autowiring and component scanning. With component scanning, Spring can automatically discover components from an application’s classpath and create them as beans in the Spring application context. With autowiring, Spring automatically injects the components with the other beans that they depend on.To get started with a new Spring project in Spring Tool Suite, go to the File menu and select New, and then Spring Starter Project. Figure 1.2 shows the menu structure to look for. Recognizing the importance of preserving what has been written, it is Manning’s policy to have the books we publish printed on acid-free paper, and we exert our best efforts to that end. Recognizing also our responsibility to conserve the resources of our planet, Manning books are printed on paper that is at least 15 percent recycled and processed without the use of elemental chlorine. TacoCloudApplicationTests.java—This is a simple test class that ensures that the Spring application context loads successfully. You’ll add more tests to the mix as you develop the application. Chapter 8 looks at using asynchronous communication to enable a Spring application to both send and receive messages using the Java Message Service, RabbitMQ, or Kafka. The only book you’ll ever need to learn and master the Spring ecosystem. This update is a must-read.

In recent versions of Spring, however, a Java-based configuration is more common. The following Java-based configuration class is equivalent to the XML configuration: You’re freed from the burden of worry about library versions. You can trust that for a given version of Spring Boot, the versions of the libraries brought in transitively will be compatible. You only need to worry about which version of Spring Boot you’re using. Craig Walls is a principal software engineer at Pivotal, a popular author, an enthusiastic supporter of Spring Framework, and a frequent conference speaker.

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You may recognize this as a typical Maven or Gradle project structure, where application source code is placed under src/main/java, test code is placed under src/test/java, and non-Java resources are placed under src/main/resources. Within that project structure, you’ll want to take note of these items: CRAIG WALLS is a principal engineer with Pivotal. He’s a zealous promoter of the Spring Framework, speaking frequently at local user groups and conferences and writing about Spring. When he’s not slinging code, Craig is planning his next trip to Disney World or Disneyland and spending as much time as he can with his wife, two daughters, two birds, and three dogs. About the cover illustration Craig Walls is a software developer at Pivotal. He's a popular author and a frequent speaker at user groups and conferences. Craig lives in Cross Roads, Texas. More recently, with the introduction of Spring Boot, automatic configuration has gone well beyond component scanning and autowiring. Spring Boot is an extension of the Spring Framework that offers several productivity enhancements. The most well-known of these enhancements is autoconfiguration, where Spring Boot can make reasonable guesses of what components need to be configured and wired together, based on entries in the classpath, environment variables, and other factors. As for the dependencies themselves, you can either expand the various sections and seek out the desired dependencies manually, or search for them in the search box at the top of the Available list. For the Taco Cloud application, you’ll start with the dependencies shown in figure 1.4.