And now we’re back where we started: Spring Boot 3.4! This release is what pulls everything together. When you look at Spring Boot, remember that it normalizes the integration of all the projects it assembles and tries, wherever possible, to smooth out whatever integration issues might arise from using those projects together. In addition, it provides facilities that benefit users of all those other frameworks. Case in point: when we introduced GraalVM native image support in Spring Framework 6 and Spring Boot 3, it was delivered in three tranches. One: a component model, lifecycle, and core SPI delivered in Spring Framework. Two: this core component model allowed all the other projects that built upon Spring Framework (you know: Spring Data, Spring Security, Spring Batch, Spring Integration, etc.) to then provide the right GraalVM native image experience for their projects. Finally, Three: Spring Boot packaged up that experience into one cohesive whole, providing GraalVM integrations for itself as well as some third-party projects, providing the build tooling plugins, and generally arranging everything so that the stuff that has to happen at compile time, before your code is ever run, gets done. Spring Boot also integrates ambient things like the GraalVM reachability metadata repository and the Buildpacks support for containerizing GraalVM native images. When it’s done right, the result is something to behold, and there’s a reason that Spring Boot has taken the world by…Read More
