Chapter 3: “Debugging and Managing your #SpringBoot app” underway

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 30, 2014

learning-spring-boot-ch3Last Friday, I submitted the 1st draft for Chapter 2: Quick Start with Java inside Learning Spring Boot. In that one, I walk through the detailed steps of crafting an app that scans for open issues against multiple GitHub repos using several Spring projects.

With that behind me, I am now diving into Chapter 3. In this chapter, I want to help any developer understand what Boot is doing, how it does it, and basically give them all the tools needed to debug and manage a Boot app.

Long ago, I remember Spring and it’s auto-wiring. This code was deemed by many as too magical, only good for toy apps, certainly not for production, and generally something that more of a trick than of real use. Today, that is no longer true. Instead, auto-wiring is recognized as a valid technique. I see it used all over the place including the app that runs http://spring.io.

I have been worried that Spring Boot might accidentally get dubbed as another form of magical code. The way it works is actually quite simple, once you understand it. Or shall I say, once I discovered how it worked last year, I sat down and quickly wrote up auto-configuration support JMS and RabbitMQ before I left the SpringOne conference. Heck, I even felt motivated to write a blog post!

So before anymore delving into what you CAN do with Spring Boot, I wanted to devote a chapter on how to debug apps and not get surprised or caught off guard.

Spring Boot has one tangled issue being worked on. There is no simple way to extract ALL the property settings or flatten out ALL the switches and flags of how Boot auto-configures things. In fact, other teams outside Spring and Pivotal are starting to create their own auto-configuration hooks as well.

You can get really far with the reference docs. But in my opinion, sooner or later, devs will have to look at the source code. My goal is to help decrypt that process and show how simple it really is.

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