Spring blog

All Posts
Engineering
Releases
News and Events

The Spring Boot Dashboard in STS - Part 3: Spring Boot Devtools reloaded

Engineering | Martin Lippert | October 22, 2015 | ...

Welcome back Spring community,

to this final part of our series about the new Spring Boot Dashboard in the Spring Tool Suite. In this final part we will take a deeper look at using the Spring Boot Devtools in combination with the boot dashboard. Again, this feature is new with Spring Boot 1.3, so you need to be on that version in order to use the following features.

Quickly deploy code changes

For local apps, using the Spring Boot Devtools is extremely easy and straightforward. As soon as you add the Spring Boot Devtools to your project as a dependency (there is an easy menu option for that in the Spring category of your context menu) and start your app, it will listen for local changes to configuration and class files and kick a restart of the app for you automatically. You don’t even need to restart the app yourself, the Spring Boot Devtools will do that for you automatically. Since STS/Eclipse produces and updates class files whenever you save a file, all this happens automatically for you when working within STS.

This story gets more interesting if you run your Spring Boot apps on a remote runtime like Cloud Foundry. In principle, you can use the Spring Boot Devtools in such a remote setting as well, but it requires a bit more work. The good news is that the Spring Boot Dashboard helps you with that.

As soon as you deploy or restart (and therefore update) a Spring Boot app on Cloud Foundry (using the boot dashboard) that has the Spring Boot Devtools on its classpath, the boot dashboard will configure the boot app on CF for the remote usage of the devtools automatically. This includes primarily the setting of a remote secret - to allow remote devtools access to it.

Once the devtools-enabled boot app is running on Cloud Foundry, you can easily start the boot devtools remote client application for it. This client application runs locally on your machine and connects to the remote application on Cloud Foundry. It watches for file changes, uploads them to the app on Cloud Foundry and triggers a restart of the app on Cloud Foundry.

Since the remote client app will watch for file changes within the project on your local machine, you can continue to work within your IDE as usual. Changed files are automatically updated to the Cloud Foundry version of the app by the remote client app. The counterpart on Cloud Foundry will restart the boot app once those changed files are stored to the app on Cloud Foundry. This works for newly compiled source code as well as for changed resource files.

This allows you to achieve quick turnaround cycles when working on your project even if it is deployed to a remote cloud runtime.

Debugging in the cloud

In addition to the automatic restart feature, the Spring Boot Devtools also enable full debugging of remote apps on a cloud runtime. This is supported by the Spring Boot Dashboard in STS, too. If you have the Spring Boot Devtools on the classpath of your application, you can press the (re)debug button for the Cloud Foundry instance of the app. This will restart the app on Cloud Foundry in debug mode, automatically start the corresponding remote client app on your machine, and hook up the Eclipse debugger to it.

You can debug the application that is running on the cloud runtime in the same way as local applications, including setting breakpoints, inspecting variables, or even hot-swapping code. However, the automatic restart feature is not available for apps running in debug mode (due to technical limitations of the boot devtools at the moment).

If you try the remote debugging of apps on Cloud Foundry, you will notice a significant slowdown in debugging. This is caused by the tunneling of the remote debug protocol of the JVM through a HTTP connection, something the remote debug protocol is not designed for. We are working on improving this by using a different transport mechanism. But the remote debugging of the app on Cloud Foundry should be something you rarely do. For more frequent debugging you might want to consider running and debugging the app locally and connecting it up with the rest of your application services via the ngrok tunneling feature that we described in the previous part of this blog series.

Conclusion

This concludes the blog series on the Spring Boot Dashboard, a new feature in the Spring Tool Suite since its 3.7.1 release. Let us know about your experiences using the dashboard.

Read more

This Week in Spring ( SpringOne2GX replay / Pieter Humphrey edition!) - October 21, 2015

Engineering | Josh Long | October 21, 2015 | ...

Welcome to another installation of This Week in Spring! This week is the first week (of many) where the crazy awesome [https://twitter.com/pieterhumphrey](Pieter Humphrey) has released scores of SpringOne2GX 2015 videos for our binge watching enjoyment! Most of this week's bountiful roundup is thanks to Pieter's meticulous transcoding, uploading and posting videos from SpringOne2GX 2015 - thanks Pieter! So without further ado, let's take a look at some of this week's selection including a LOT of content from SpringOne2GX, including..

Read more

SpringOne2GX 2015 replay: Booting IoT with Grails

Engineering | Pieter Humphrey | October 19, 2015 | ...

Recorded at SpringOne2GX 2015.

Speakers: Colin Harrington, OCI Web

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/SpringCentral/booting-iot-with-grails

In a world of the cloud, virtualization, containerization, microservices and nanoservices we talk about scaling up, scaling out, and decoupling our systems, but typically miss scaling down to an embedded platform. At the same time that we have moved away from heavy monolithic web containers, we've seen a rise of powerful low cost embedded Linux devices such as the RaspberryPi.

Read more

The Spring Boot Dashboard in STS - Part 2: Working with Cloud Foundry

Engineering | Martin Lippert | October 15, 2015 | ...

Welcome back Spring community,

In this second part of our blog series about the new Spring Boot Dashboard in the Spring Tool Suite we will move beyond local applications in your workspace and take a look at remote apps deployed to a cloud runtime. If you missed the first part, please take a look it to get familiar with the boot dashboard in STS first.

Cloud runtime support

The initial remote target that we support in the Boot Dashboard is Cloud Foundry. Neither the design nor the implementation of the Boot Dashboard limits this to be the only supported remote target, it is just the first one that we worked on.

The goal for us was to provide a similar experience as for local apps, giving you an easy way to interact, start, stop, update, and lookup log output of your Spring Boot apps on Cloud Foundry. Therefore you can add a Cloud Foundry section to the boot dashboard using the big plus icon in the toolbar.

Once you entered your credentials and selected an org/space, a new section will appear in the boot dashboard, listing the apps that are deployed to this space on Cloud Foundry. You can see the name of the app as well as the number of instances that are configured and that are up and running.

The basic actions work for one or multiple apps on CF in the same or a very similar way to how they work for local apps. You can jump to the console output and it will appear in the console view of STS/Eclipse, you can start and stop apps, you can double-click them to get to a browser window for the running app, you can configure a default path for the app, and you can add/remove tags to/from those apps. You can even execute some of the actions (like start and stop) across targets, if you select multiple entries in the boot dashboard across those target sections.

In addition to the common actions that are suitable for local and apps on Cloud Foundry, there are certain additional actions specifically for apps on Cloud Foundry. The boot dashboard allows you, for example, to delete an app entirely from Cloud Foundry, or to easily jump to the web console.

Deploying to Cloud Foundry

Up to here, we talked about existing apps on Cloud Foundry. But how do you get your apps deployed to Cloud Foundry? There are various ways, using the CLI or the Eclipse Plugin for Cloud Foundry. The boot dashboard offers you another option: you can drag&drop your Spring Boot application directly onto the Cloud Foundry target in the dashboard and it will deploy the Spring Boot app to CF. This is as easy as its sounds.

If your application contains a manifest.yml file, this will be used to configure the application for Cloud Foundry. This typically contains the name of the app, the domain, memory settings, number of instances, and potentially a lot more.

If you don’t have a manifest.yml file in your project, the deploy action will prompt you in a dialog for the basic information it needs to deploy the app.

But take care: if the project contains a manifest.yml file, it will be used to deploy and configure the app. Changes to the configuration on CF that you might have made via the web console will be lost the next time you restart/redeploy/update your app using the boot dashboard. Either configure everything in the manifest.yml file or go without it altogether - at least for the moment. We will be working to improve this to allow more flexible ways of dealing with manifest.yml files and external changes to the config of your app, but that is something to be done in future releases of STS.

Once the app is deployed, the boot dashboard will keep the association between the project in your workspace and the deployed app on Cloud Foundry (and will show this association in the boot dashboard).

Keeping this association between your workspace project and the app on Cloud Foundry makes changes to this app a lot easier. If you change the code in your workspace and press the (re)start button for the app on CF, the boot dashboard will automatically re-push the app (the changes) to Cloud Foundry.

Once you have deployed your apps on Cloud Foundry, you often don’t need to work on everything locally at the same time. Usually you focus on certain parts of the application and sometimes you would like to use use even both: some services running on Cloud Foundry and some services running on your local machine in your IDE. But how do they interact?

Tunneling local services for mixed deployments

As an early experiment, we built a specific feature into the boot dashboard that lets you use all your services and apps on CF and have them call individual services running on your local machine. That way you can focus on individual projects of your landscape and continue to use Cloud Foundry for the rest of your world. You can quickly iterate and work on the code locally - and test it while working with the other parts on Cloud Foundry. Isn’t that great?

They way this works is: You have a service discovery mechanism for your microservices in place. At the moment we support the Eureka service discovery service for this feature. You can start your local Spring Boot app using a special action called “(re)start and expose app via ngrok”. Executing this action will (re)start your local app on your machine. At the same time the action will create a public visible tunnel to this app using the ngrok service. As a result, you get a publicly visible URL that routes all its traffic to your local machine and to the local Spring Boot app that is running on your local machine. The app is automatically configured to register with the remote Eureka using this publicly visible tunnel URL.

Clients to this service will now get this tunnel URL from Eureka instead of (or in addition to) the default instance of your service that might be running on Cloud Foundry already - and will call your locally running service instead of the one on CF. You can iterate on your local service quickly or even debug it.

This mixed deployment scenario is obviously not useful for production or team environments, where multiple people are using the applications on CF simultaneously. But this is extremely useful for testing and development environments.

The support for Cloud Foundry is just a starting point here. The Spring Boot Dashboard is by no means limited or focused on Cloud Foundry. Other remote cloud runtimes could and will be added in the future. One of the next runtimes that we are going to work on is Lattice, but other runtimes are very welcome as well. If you are interested in collaborating on this, let us know. The Spring Boot Dashboard is open-source under the EPL and we would be more than happy to collaborate with you on additional features and adding support for more cloud runtimes to it.

Outlook

The third part of this series will introduce you to the built-in support for the Spring Boot Devtools and how you can use them from within the Boot Dashboard to make quick modifications to your apps (even on CF) and how to do remote debugging on CF.

Read more

React.js and Spring Data REST: Part 4 - Events

Engineering | Greg L. Turnquist | October 13, 2015 | ...
To see updates to this code, visit our React.js and Spring Data REST tutorial.

In the previous session, you introduced conditional updates to avoid collisions with other users when editing the same data. You also learned how to version data on the backend with optimistic locking. You got a tip off if someone edited the same record so you could refresh the page and get the update.

That’s good. But do you know what’s even better? Having the UI dynamically respond when other people update the resources.

In this session you’ll learn how to use Spring Data REST’s built in event system to detect changes in the backend and publish updates to ALL users through Spring’s WebSocket support. Then you’ll be able to dynamically adjust clients as the data updates.

Feel free to grab the code from this repository and follow along. This session is based on the previous session’s app with extra things added.

Adding Spring WebSocket support to the project

Before getting underway, you need to add a dependency to your project’s pom.xml file:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-websocket</artifactId>
</dependency>

This bring in Spring Boot’s WebSocket starter.

Configuring WebSockets with Spring

Spring comes with powerful WebSocket support. One thing to recognize is that a WebSocket is a very low level protocol. It does little more than offer the means to transmit data between client and server. The recommendation is to use a sub-protocol (STOMP for this session) to actually encode data and routes.

The follow code is used to configure WebSocket support on the server side:

@Component
@EnableWebSocketMessageBroker
public class WebSocketConfiguration extends AbstractWebSocketMessageBrokerConfigurer {

static final String MESSAGE_PREFIX = "/topic";

@Override
public void registerStompEndpoints(StompEndpointRegistry registry) {
	registry.addEndpoint("/payroll").withSockJS();
}

@Override
public void configureMessageBroker(MessageBrokerRegistry registry) {
	registry.enableSimpleBroker(MESSAGE_PREFIX);
	registry.setApplicationDestinationPrefixes("/app");
}



}

  • @EnableWebSocketMessageBroker turns on WebSocket support.
  • AbstractWebSocketMessageBrokerConfigurer provides a convenient base class to configure basic features.
  • MESSAGE_PREFIX is the prefix you will prepend to every message’s route.
  • registerStompEndpoints() is used to configure the endpoint on the backend for clients and server to link (/payroll).
  • configureMessageBroker() is used to configure the broker used to relay messages between server and client.

With this configuration, it’s now possible to tap into Spring Data REST events and publish them over a WebSocket.

Subscribing to Spring Data REST events

Spring Data REST generates several application events based on actions occurring on the repositories. The follow code shows how to subscribe to some of these events:

@Component
@RepositoryEventHandler(Employee.class)
public class EventHandler {

private final SimpMessagingTemplate websocket;

private final EntityLinks entityLinks;

@Autowired
public EventHandler(SimpMessagingTemplate websocket, 
			EntityLinks…
Read more

This Week in Spring - October 13, 2015

Engineering | Josh Long | October 13, 2015 | ...

Welcome to another installation of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Krakow, Poland, for JDD and then it's off to St. Petersburg, Russia for the Joker conference!

We've got a lot to cover so let's get to it!

Read more

The Spring Boot Dashboard in STS - Part 1: Local Boot Apps

Engineering | Martin Lippert | October 08, 2015 | ...

Welcome Spring community,

This is the first of three blog entries introducing you to the new Spring Boot Dashboard in STS. You will see how to use the Spring Boot Dashboard in the IDE, learn about the various features it provides, and how it helps you while developing applications based on Spring Boot. Since the Spring Boot Dashboard was introduced in the recently released STS 3.7.1, you will need that version to follow this blog series. If you don't have that installed yet, please go to http://spring.io/tools/ and grab your copy of it.

Introduction

Spring Boot is now a widely adopted technology to simplify your life when implementing Spring applications for the enterprise. Especially suitable for creating microservice-based applications, it has changed the way we think about small and easy to configure Spring applications dramatically. Together with Spring Cloud, it opens the door to truly cloud-native applications, composed out of probably many microservices.

This dramatic shift in our architectural thinking needs to be reflected in our IDEs as well. Most of our traditional Java IDEs out there were invented not only in the pre-cloud-native era, but in the pre-cloud and to a certain degree in the pre-distributed era of programming. The same is true for the Spring Tool Suite and its base, the Eclipse IDE. It is time to push those IDEs into the cloud-native era. This was the starting point for the Spring Boot Dashboard. Its focus is to help you deal with a potentially larger number of Spring-Boot-based microservice applications and make your life as a developer a lot easier when working on those projects in your IDE.

The Spring Boot Dashboard

Starting small and incrementally, the Spring Boot Dashboard comes as an additional view in STS/Eclipse. You can open it by pressing the Spring Boot button in your main toolbar. It opens up a simple view that is in sync with your workspace projects, showing those projects of your workspace that are Spring Boot projects.

The main purpose of the Boot Dashboard is to give you quick access to the things you do every day, every hour, or even more frequently. You can quickly start your boot apps (in run or debug mode) by selecting them in the boot dashboard and pressing the "run" or "debug" action in the toolbar. There is no faster way to launch your boot app than this. And since you probably are going to change code and want to restart your app, the action lets you restart your boot app, if it is already running. Change your code, press the "run" button in the boot dashboard, and your boot app gets stopped and restarted for you. Again, a simple one-click action.

The great thing about these actions (and many more) in the boot dashboard is that they operate on single or multiple projects at the same time. If you want to start or stop a bunch of boot apps at the same time, for example to startup a set of collaborating services, just select them all in the dashboard and press "run". That's it.

As soon as you adopt Spring Boot 1.3 in your projects, you will notice additional goodies showing up in the Boot Dashboard. As soon as your boot app is being started, the boot dashboard visualizes that the app is starting - and it distinguishes between its startup phase (the VM is running, but the app is still initializing) and it is truly running and ready to use. The progress icon indicates the app is still starting up, the green "up" icon shows up as soon as the app is fully initialized and running. You don't need to observe the log output until some "server started" message shows up or something like that. The boot dashboards icons will let you know.

Once the app is running, the port that it listens on will show up in the boot dashboard - for your convenience. You don't have to scan the log output anymore to find out what port is being used by the app. The dashboard displays that information automatically. And in case you would like to jump to the console output of a running boot app, there is a quick action for that as well.

Often there is no need anymore to know about the port of a running app - since you don't have to open a browser tab for the app yourself. Double-click on the project in the boot dashboard and it will open a new browser tab for you - directly navigating to the apps default URL.

By default, this opens an Eclipse/STS internal browser view. If you prefer to use an external browser, you can set this in the preferences.

In case this default URL is not the one you would like to visit by default, you can customize that. Open the properties view, select the project in the boot dashboard and enter the default URL extension that you prefer. The double-click will open the default URL of the app + your customized extension to it.

In case you are not sure what URL extensions your application defines, you can select the “Request Mappings” tab in the properties view. All the request mappings of the running app are listed - your self-defined ones at the top, the ones coming from libraries at the bottom of that list. Double-clicking on the URL extension opens a browser for that extension, double-clicking on the code pointer opens the corresponding file of your project in an editor and jumps to the line that defines the request mapping.

The more microservice projects you have in your workspace, the more likely it is that you don’t work on all of them at the same time. You would like to focus on a subset. In Eclipse/STS, you might have created a working set, for example. The boot dashboard allows you to tag projects with an arbitrary number of tags (again, in the properties view). Those tags can then be used in the filter box (at the top of the boot dashboard) to reduce the number of projects that show up in the boot dashboard.

Outlook

The second part of this series will introduce you to the Cloud Foundry integration of the Boot dashboard, how to deploy microservices to CF from within the boot dashboard, and how to use local boot apps in combination with those deployed on CF.

Read more

This Week in Spring - October 6th, 2015

Engineering | Josh Long | October 07, 2015 | ...

Welcome to another installation of This Week in Spring! As usual we've got a lot to cover this week so let's get to it!

Read more

Evolving Spring Initializr

Engineering | Brian Clozel | October 06, 2015 | ...

We're happy to release today the new version of Spring Initializr at https://start.spring.io !

What started out as a small, in-house web application that generates Spring Boot projects, grew into something bigger than we expected. You can now use Spring Initializr on the web, in your favorite IDE (Eclipse STS and IntelliJ IDEA) and even with your command-line tools (try curl https://start.spring.io).

In the meantime, the Spring portfolio is growing and we received a lot of useful feedback from the Spring community. Because nothing beats actual data, we've improved the service to export its metrics to a centralized redis instance, before the summer. This allows us to keep a reliable set of statistics for a long period of activity (and regardless of the number of instances we deploy on Pivotal Web Services…

Read more

This Week in Spring - September 29, 2015

Engineering | Josh Long | September 30, 2015 | ...

Welcome to another installation of This Week in Spring! To those of you reading from the US, let me be the first to wish you a very happy national coffee day! As usual, we've got a lot to cover so let's get to it!

Read more

Get the Spring newsletter

Stay connected with the Spring newsletter

Subscribe

Get ahead

VMware offers training and certification to turbo-charge your progress.

Learn more

Get support

Tanzu Spring offers support and binaries for OpenJDK™, Spring, and Apache Tomcat® in one simple subscription.

Learn more

Upcoming events

Check out all the upcoming events in the Spring community.

View all