Are Spring and Spring Boot Frameworks Worth Learning in 2020?
By: Scand Ltd.
Tags: Spring, Spring Boot

The existence of a vivid ecosystem is one of the best things about Java. It means that it’s dripping with various libraries and frameworks to dive headfirst into whatever demand or issue arises. Usually, there’s no need for a developer to know all frameworks and libraries as long as it’s not required by the project. However, there are some ‘must-haves’ such as Hibernate, Spring, Spring Boot, GWT, JSF, and others any Java developer should be aware of to be able to build robust cloud computing, eCommerce, finance, banking, and a pile of other apps efficiently.

Are Spring and Spring Boot Relevant in 2020?

Shaped as a prewritten code, frameworks exist to support, guide, and level up the app development without the manual overhead. In 2020, Spring and Spring Boot development platforms are thought to be one of the most popular ones with Spring Boot reaching 83% and Spring amounting to 82.70%. Another research held by JetBrains shows the Spring Boot popularity climbing up to 61–63% and the Spring’s one capturing 30% of the global market use.

If Spring Is That Handy, Why Does Spring Boot Outstrip?

Due to the bulky configuration and perplexed dependency management, building an enterprise app using Spring can be error-prone and tedious especially when it deals with apps using third-party libraries. Thus, every time you have to follow the same steps:

Spring modules import as required by the app (ORM, MVC, JDBC),

Web container library import,

Third-party libraries import (the compatibility with the specified Spring version required),

DAO beans and web layer beans configuration (transaction management, data source, etc. and view resolver, resource manager, etc.),

Defining a starter class to load the required configurations.

Spring Boot development, however, can get rid of some hurdles listed above, especially when it refers to Hibernate Datasource, and Session Factory, Entity Manager setup. Let’s reveal how.

Spring vs Spring Boot: Key Features

Any modern application is made up of many components, each is designed to maintain its piece of the application functionality, harmonizing with the other application elements. The most fascinating thing about Spring and Spring Boot application development is the ability to automatically provide the foundational plumbing, letting the developer focus on the app logic instead.

The Spring framework has a container (Spring app context) to create and manage app components (beans) whereas the act of tying the latter together is called dependency injection (DI). The latter constitutes Spring’s key feature. On top of that, Spring coupled with various related libraries provides many features including data persistence, a reactive programming model, runtime monitoring, integration with other systems, microservice support, etc.

Typical full-fledged Spring web application. Source: spring.io

Spring Boot is defined as a ‘convention-over-configuration’ module of Spring. Requiring little Spring configuration overall, it ensures building standalone production-level web apps to be ‘simply run’. Spring Boot was created as a tool that automates the setup procedure and streamlines the Spring’s app development and deployment.

To better comprehend the features and functionalities of both Spring and Spring Boot and the reasons they’re worth learning, let’s have a look at the table below:

Key Takeaways

Spring is a powerful framework that comes with handy features including Spring MVC, Spring Initializr, Spring Tool Suite, Spring Boot Dashboard, Spring Boot CLI, to name a few. Spring Boot apps tend to incorporate everything they require with them with no need to be deployed to the app server (as it happens with Tomcat being a part of it). Spring Boot DevTools with various useful development tools such as automatic app restart once the code is changed, automatic browser refresh once JS, templates, or stylesheets are changed, built-in H2 Console once the H2 database is being used, and more.

It seems that every code written in Spring or Spring Boot is aimed toward the goal to simplify the app development and unveil up-to-date technologies and utilities so a developer can focus on the code to meet the app requirements rather than satisfy the framework requirements.

If you’re planning to build your app and need to hire a Spring or Spring Boot developer, feel free to contact us.