Chapter 2’s first draft is roughed out

By Greg Turnquist

Greg is a member of the Spring team, an author of several books on Spring Boot, conference speaker, and the lead for Spring Data JPA.

June 21, 2014

ch2_fodtLast night, I finished up the last bits of chapter 2’s first draft. I like to knock out a chapter in the rough and then go through it, applying bits of polish. For me, it’s always easier to polish something that already exists.

My biggest concern was the fact that Spring Boot keeps taking away space filling code! So instead of creating some boring toy app, I had to think up something bigger. I figured an app that scans open issues from multiple GitHub repositories (part my upcoming webinar on creating management apps with Spring Boot) would be good enough. Wrong!

This chapter’s demo app has become way too small! Ever hear of that? Our apps usually are too big, especially for the medium of print. I tried to fill up the allotted space with deploying to one of the fastest growing PaaS’s out there: Cloud Foundry. There are over thirty members of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, so showing how über easy it is to push your Boot app up to a cloud should eat up space, right.

Wrong again! Well this has forced me to roll up my sleeves and actually write some pragmatic support scripts that load the system down and gather metrics at the same time….using Spring Boot!

So after slaving away at creating useful code, deployed to a useful platform, with useful support, I figured any more content and this chapter would explode in practical density. I saved my last changes and decided its time to now go through and polish things up. There’s always an opportunity to add another chapter later on, right?

It’s nice to read through the manuscript and see if it flows. Am I going to fast? Too slow? Sometimes its a mix of both. Given that this will be THE first Spring Boot to hit the proverbial shelves, I want it to be a good reading experience. I also ponder what questions the reader might be thinking, and try to insert pull-outs answering them.

I’m also incredibly happy that I was able to get a functional Asciidoctor backend written AT THE SAME TIME. Don’t worry, I drink plenty of coffee in the morning to recover from my total lack of sleep. 🙂

Stay tuned for future developments!

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