Craig Walls

Next Gen Spring Boot 2023 Edition featuring Spring 6

9:00 AM MDT

The Spring Framework transformed enterprise Java development nearly two decades ago, making it easier to achieve common things such as transactions, security, loose-coupling, and much more Over the years, Spring has continued to rise to every challenge Java developers face, most recently addressing subjects such as reactive programming, cloud computing, and container deployment in Kubernetes. Meanwhile, Spring Boot makes easy work of Spring by employing (among other things) auto-configuration, runtime insight and management, and a practical convention for specifying application properties.

The releases of Spring Framework 6 and Spring Boot 3 bring exciting and useful new capabilities. With features like native compilation, improved observability and tracing, support for HTTP problem details, and declarative HTTP clients, as well as baselining on Java 17 and Jakarta EE 9, Spring is ready for a new generation of application development.

In this workshop, you'll start with a very simple Spring Boot application and learn to grow it into a fully functional application including a web front-end and data persistence. And you'll get hands-on experience with some of the most exciting new features in Spring 6 and Spring Boot 3.

What's New in Spring and Spring Boot

8:30 AM MDT

In this example-driven session, we'll review several tips and tricks to make the most out of your Spring development experience. You'll see how to apply the best features of Spring and Spring Boot, including the latest and greatest features of Spring Framework 6.x and Spring Boot 3.x with an eye to what's coming in Spring 7 and Boot 4.

Spring has been the de facto standard framework for Java development for nearly two decades. Over the years, Spring has continued to evolve and adapt to meet the ever-changing requirements of software development. And for nearly half that time, Spring Boot has carried Spring forward, capturing some of the best Spring patterns as auto-configuration.

As with any framework or language that has this much history and power, there are just as many ways to get it right as there are to get it wrong. How do you know that you are applying Spring in the best way in your application?

Reactive Spring

10:30 AM MDT

In this example-driven presentation, we'll take a high-level look at how Spring applies reactive programming at all layers of an application. You'll also learn the essentials of working with Project Reactor, the reactive programming library for Java that Spring's reactive support builds upon.

Traditionally, applications have been built using a blocking, synchronous model. Although comfortable and intuitive for most programmers, this model doesn't scale well. And although there are several new approaches to reactive programming, they don't necessarily fit into the familiar programming model that Spring developers are accustomed to working with.

Spring 5 introduced a set of new reactive features, enabling non-blocking, asynchronous code that scales well using minimal threads. Moreover, it builds on the same concepts and programming models that Spring developers have used for years.

Reactive Spring APIs

1:00 PM MDT

In this example-driven presentation, we'll focus on how to build reactive APIs in Spring. We'll start with Spring WebFlux, a reactive reimagining of the popular Spring MVC framework for HTTP-based APIs. Then we'll have a look at RSocket, an intriguing new communication protocol that is reactive by design.

Traditionally, applications have been built using a blocking, synchronous model. Although comfortable and intuitive for most programmers, this model doesn't scale well. And although there are several new approaches to reactive programming, they don't necessarily fit into the familiar programming model that Spring developers are accustomed to working with.

Spring 5 introduced a set of new reactive features, enabling non-blocking, asynchronous code that scales well using minimal threads. Moreover, it builds on the same concepts and programming models that Spring developers have used for years.

Reactive Spring Persistence

3:00 PM MDT

In this example-driven presentation, we'll focus on working with reactive data persistence. We'll start by seeing how to create reactive repositories for relational databases with Spring Data R2DBC. Then we'll explore non-relational reactive persistence for MongoDB and Cassandra.

Traditionally, applications have been built using a blocking, synchronous model. Although comfortable and intuitive for most programmers, this model doesn't scale well. And although there are several new approaches to reactive programming, they don't necessarily fit into the familiar programming model that Spring developers are accustomed to working with.

Spring 5 introduced a set of new reactive features, enabling non-blocking, asynchronous code that scales well using minimal threads. Moreover, it builds on the same concepts and programming models that Spring developers have used for years.

Spring Graph QL

5:00 PM MDT

In this example-driven session, we're going to look at how to implement GraphQL in Spring. You'll learn how Spring for GraphQL builds upon GraphQL Java, recognize the use-cases that are best suited for GraphQL, and how to build a GraphQL API in Spring.

Typical REST APIs deal in resources. This is fine for many use cases, but it tends to be more rigid and less efficient in others.

For example, in an shopping API, it's important to weigh how much or how little information should be provided in a request for an order resource? Should the order resource contain only order specifics, but no details about the order's line items or the products in those line items? If all relevant details is included in the response, then it's breaking the boundaries of what the resource should offer and is overkill for clients that do not need it. On the other hand, proper factoring of the resource will require that the client make multiple requests to the API to fetch relevant information that they may need.

GraphQL offers a more flexible alternative to REST, setting aside the resource-oriented model and focusing more on what a client needs. Much as how SQL allows for data from multiple tables to be selected and joined in response to a query, GraphQL offers API clients the possibility of tailoring the response to provide all of the information needed and nothing that they do not need.

The Talking App: From (A)lexa to (Z)ork. Creating interactive fiction for Alexa

7:30 PM MDT

In this example-driven session, we'll use the Skill Flow Builder to create an interactive fiction game for Alexa from the ground up. We'll see how to manage the player's inventory of items, apply conditional effects, and add sounds and imagery to bring interactive fiction games to the voice-first generation.

“You are standing in a room with a table. On the table is black cylindrical device with the word 'Amazon' on the side. What do you want to do next?”

For as long as there have been computers, there have been computer games. Some of the earliest games were text-based adventure games like Colossal Cave Adventure and the Zork series. These games invited intrepid adventurers to use their imagination and wits to navigate complex worlds, solving puzzles to achieve the game's objective. Modern games are far more sophisticated than those early text adventures. Even so, there was still something amazingly endearing and fun about exploring caves and dungeons looking for treasure in games that were more like books where you are the main character.

Voice-enabled devices like Alexa are now breathing new life into the interactive fiction game genre. Rather than typing in your next move, you can speak it to Alexa; and she will describe the outcome to you, possibly with music and sound effects to set the mood. When played on a screen-based Alexa device, images can accompany the textual description for a richer immersion into the fictional world.