Many people are using containers to wrap their Spring Boot applications, and building containers is not a simple thing to do. This is an article for developers of Spring Boot applications, and containers are not always a good abstraction for developers - they force you to learn about and think about very low level concerns - but you will on occasion be called on to create or use a container, so it pays to understand the building blocks. Here we aim to show you some of the choices you can make if you are faced with the prospect of needing to create your own container.

Spring Cloud Function has a couple of new features in 2.0 (still in milestone phase), and possibly the most dramatic is the ability to go "fully functional". This is made possible by changes in Spring Boot 2.1 together with Spring Framework 5.1, and it means a different way of thinking about bean definitions in Spring applications, but also significant improvements in startup performance.

Spring Cloud Function has had support for Microsoft Azure Functions since version 1.0, but in the latest 2.0 releases (still in milestone phase) we decided to change the programming model a bit. This article describes what the changes mean for users, and provides a bit of background behind the shift. We in the Spring team had a lot of fun working on this and collaborating with the folks at Microsoft to get the best blend of the two technologies for our users.

Microsoft has had Java support in Azure Functions for a while, and it enables developers to easily write and deploy Java code that connects in a serverless way to a wide range of platform services (events, databases, storage, HTTP gateways, etc.) in Azure. It comes with an annotation-based programming model that puts the function implementations in Java methods. So you write a method and annotation it with @FunctionName, and it becomes an Azure Function. There is a rich set of tools based on a Maven plugin (currently) that drives the Azure command line and can be used to build a function, run and debug it locally and deploy it to the cloud. There is a Quickstart Guide on the Azure website which will help you get all the pre-requisites installed and working, and there is more detailed documentation about how Azure Functions works in the Developer’s Guide.

I don’t do much server-side templating, but when I do…​ well frankly, I tend to forget things. Every template language has its strengths and weaknesses, and they all have syntax to remember, and more frequently to forget. Recently I completed some work on the old Spring Petclinic, converting it to use Thymeleaf in the view layer, and re-organizing the code to be a bit more "modern". I enjoyed working with Thymeleaf 3, and found it a pleasant experience, but had to spend a lot of time scanning documentation and samples. Then I had another little project that needed some templates, and I remembered my fondness for Mustache, which we added to Spring Boot back in version 1.2, and which plays an important role in the excellent Spring REST Docs tool. I added spring-boot-starter-mustache to my new project, and was up and running within seconds.

In this article we continue the series on Reactive Programming, and the focus is less on learning the basic APIs and more on more concrete use cases and writing code that actually does something useful. We will see how Reactive is a useful abstraction for concurrent programming, but also that it has some very low level features that we should learn to treat with respect and caution. If we start to use these features to their full potential we can take control of layers in our application that previously were invisible, hidden by containers, platforms and frameworks.

In this article we continue the series on Reactive Programming, and we concentrate on explaining some concepts through actual code samples. The end result should be that you understand a bit better what makes Reactive different, and what makes it functional. The examples here are quite abstract, but they give you a way to think about the APIs and the programming style, and start to get a feel for how it is different. We will see the elements of Reactive, and learn how to control the flow of data, and process in background threads if necessary.

Reactive Programming is interesting (again) and there is a lot of noise about it at the moment, not all of which is very easy to understand for an outsider and simple enterprise Java developer, such as the author. This article (the first in a series) might help to clarify your understanding of what the fuss is about. The approach is as concrete as possible, and there is no mention of "denotational semantics". If you are looking for a more academic approach and loads of code samples in Haskell, the internet is full of them, but you probably don’t want to be here.