#SpringBoot gives you the kinds of problems you want

By Greg Turnquist

Greg L. Turnquist worked on the Spring team for over thirteen years and is a senior staff technical content engineer at Cockroach Labs. He was the lead for Spring Data JPA and Spring Web Services. He wrote Packt's best-selling title, Learning Spring Boot 2.0 2nd Edition, and its 3rd Edition follow-up along many others.

June 16, 2014

ch2_fodtAt my old company, I had a manager that was happy to point out when we had “good” problems. He was often citing situations where we had too much work from the customer such that our current staffing levels couldn’t keep up. Instead of anyone being let go, we sought out new talent to tackle this.

Well Spring Boot recently started causing me some problems that I discovered were good to have. As I was roughing out chapter two of Learning Spring Boot, “Quick Start with Java”, I noticed that my page count was coming in around in the mid-twenties. The estimate I had submitted was forty pages. What?!?!

I have an app that connects to GitHub and scans for open issues across two repositories. It plugs in using Spring Mobile to automatically detect the user agent of the browser and switch which view template is rendered. The mobile template uses jQuery Mobile to provide a nice mobile experience.

Well I already chewed out Roy for cutting out the code to set up the view resolver. The nerve of that man to reduce half a page of code to a single property setting! Heh.

What am I supposed to do? Usually, when you write code for books, you have to trim stuff down to toy applications because there isn’t enough space. But I’m discovering that with same amount of space, I’m able to write production grade apps. I had an idea of where to fill in some more details, but after reading the outline again last night, I might have to re-evaluate. I have a slew of stuff in the next chapter that I don’t want to just pull into this one.

The irony? My original proposal to Packt called for ten chapters, but to speed up time-to-market, was cut back to five. I may yet fit in ten chapters worth of material in the allotted space.

All-in-all, Spring Boot’s ability to trim code down to a fraction to get the same things done is a good problem to have!

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