Late last week, I wrapped up chapter one, “Quick Start with Groovy”. Whenever I present Spring Boot for the first time to a group, I lead with what Rob Winch snappily tweeted last August:

@Controller class ThisWillActuallyRun { @RequestMapping(“/”) @ResponseBody String home() { “Hello World!” } }

— Rob Winch (@rob_winch) August 6, 2013

This kind of sums up the power of Spring Boot. Just a few annotations provide enough clues for a bit of software to configure Spring MVC, Jackson2, and embedded Tomcat. That and other discussion threads about how far you can get with this Groovy + CLI approach made me want to dive into my book on this front.

In this chapter, I basically take a similar app, and dial things up as far as possible to take it to production. It’s amazing how much functionality can be covered in just seventeen pages. It’s a testament to the expressiveness of Groovy and to Boot’s powerful auto-configuration features.

I want to blow the reader’s mind and make them understand, it’s not just a toy. You have access to the battle tested Spring + Apache Tomcat stack, any industry accepted javascript library you can think of, and a whole gamut of production support tools.

Is the whole book coded using Spring Boot’s CLI tool? No. I figured that the majority of readers out there probably use either java or groovy inside a project+build file. Boot’s CLI makes for powerful microservices, but this book isn’t about microservices.

The first deadline is approaching, and I always, always, ALWAYS like to stay ahead of the curve. In my opinion, the key to avoiding a crushing deadline is to not let it be crushing. I prefer to be a chapter or two ahead and then have time to go back and further polish things up. I’ve already roughed out about 25% of the chapter two. Once that’s done, I can go back and fine tune that chapter.

Cheers!