What items are a must or Required and should be integrated with a new Spring Boot Project

What items are Required & Integrated to a Spring Boot Project

Posted on by Toma Velev

When starting a new Spring Boot project, several core components and dependencies are essential to include, depending on the project’s requirements and goals. Here are some key items that are generally considered “must-haves” for a typical Spring Boot application:

1. Spring Boot Starters

Spring Boot Starters are convenient dependency descriptors to simplify your project’s build configuration. Some common starters include:

  • spring-boot-starter-web: For building web, including RESTful, applications using Spring MVC or some other UI framework.
  • spring-boot-starter-data-jpa: For working with databases using JPA (Java Persistence API) and Hibernate.
  • spring-boot-starter-security: For securing your application with Spring Security.
  • spring-boot-starter-test: For testing Spring applications, including JUnit, Mockito, and Spring Test.

2. Database Integration

Depending on your database choice, you might need:

  • Database driver: For example, mysql-connector-java for MySQL, postgresql for PostgreSQL, etc.
  • Connection Pool: Libraries like HikariCP (usually included by default in Spring Boot) for efficient connection pooling.

3. Configuration Management

  • Spring Boot Configuration Files: application.properties or application.yml for externalized configuration.
  • Environment-specific configuration: Profiles like application-dev.yml, application-prod.yml for different environments.
  • Dev-Ops Files: Such files may be Dockerfile, docker-compose.yaml, .env, etc.

4. Different Environments 

Most often there are 3 or 4 environments for where your application is running and you should have seaprate configuration files for each one of them: 

  • Dev – where things could (and it is ok as it is work in progress) to temporaly break
  • Test – here it should be more stable and offered to QA engineer to play around
  • Client Acceptance – things should get solid at this phase. The Developer may not have direct access to here, but every change and upgrade must happen with automated tools that are monitored
  • Production – The place for all users – where things MUST be rock solid

5. Logging

  • Logging Frameworks: Logback (default with Spring Boot), Log4j2, or SLF4J.
  • Logging configuration: Set up appropriate log levels and output formats in logback-spring.xml or application.properties.

6. Security

  • Spring Security: For authentication and authorization.
  • JWT (JSON Web Token): For securing REST APIs (if applicable).
  • OAuth2: For integrating with external identity providers (if required).

7. Data Access and ORM

  • Spring Data JPA: For data access with JPA.
  • Entity classes: For representing database tables.
  • Repositories: For data access layer (DAOs).

8. API Documentation

  • README.md – with howtos, setups, instructions and examples for other devs.
  • Diagrams of the Software Logic
  • Diagram of the Code Architecture
  • Springfox/Swagger: For API documentation and testing interface.
  • OpenAPI: For generating and describing RESTful APIs.
  • JavaDoc descripion of the classes and methods – especially of the project is actualy a library

10. Monitoring and Metrics

  • Spring Boot Actuator: For monitoring and managing the application with metrics, health checks, etc.
  • Micrometer: For metrics collection and integration with monitoring systems like Prometheus or Grafana.

10. Testing and Static Code Analysis

  • JUnit: For unit and integration testing.
  • Mockito: For mocking in tests.
  • Spring Test: For testing Spring components and configuration.
  • Database, Integration tests
  • (Jococo) Code coverage requirements – before getting code pushed to the repository.
  • Code analyzer tool – to check out for stincky code.

11. Development Tools

  • Spring Boot DevTools: For live reload and development-time conveniences.
  • Lombok: To reduce boilerplate code by generating getters, setters, etc.

12. Dependency Management and Build Tools

  • Maven or Gradle: For managing dependencies and building the project.

13. Version Control and CI/CD

  • Git: For version control.
  • CI/CD Tools: Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, etc., for continuous integration and deployment pipelines.

14. Cloud Integration (Optional)

  • Spring Cloud: For microservices architecture, including components like Config Server, Eureka, Zuul, etc.
  • Cloud-specific integrations: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc., depending on the deployment environment.

These components provide a robust foundation for building, testing, and deploying Spring Boot applications. The specific choices and configurations depend on your project’s requirements and architecture.

All of these integraitons may be selected from the Spring Started Web Page: https://start.spring.io/. I also have build a project generator inside my App Builder Vaadin App: https://programtom.com/dev/product/app-builder-code-generation-spring-micro-service-vaadin-app/ and I am incrememntally adding the items from this blog post as I am building Micro Services and Web Apps: https://programtom.com/dev/product-category/technologies/spring-boot-framework/?orderby=date-desc.