Having worked with spring boot for a while, I find that there are certain things that can be added with ease and will be quite useful. Let’s see them one by one.
1. start.spring.io
Many of you might be aware of this site. It lets you create a spring boot project based on your preference (say maven/gradle). It helps beginners to create spring boot projects without any issues on the first go.
2. Spring boot devtools
Spring boot devtools is a must have dependency in your spring boot project. It requires zero configuration. Only thing however you need to do is to enable Automatic build in your IDE. Your classpath changes are hot reloaded in the server with a restart during development.
3. lombok
Lombok is used to make your pojos/dtos/entities(model) object to be clutter free with getters, setters, constructors, builders, equals(), hashCode. A single annotation as @Getter and you are done with getters for all the variables defined in the class.
4. Swagger
Swagger is an openApi specification - the industry statndard for RESTful API design. Springfox provides dependencies that creates the swagger json and the swagger UI. With zero documentation effort, you get a UI from where you can try out your rest APIs and a beautiful documentation page. However you can further customize the swagger ui page with additional swagger annotations.
5. Checkstyle
We all might have at some point in our life, had to look at others code. Raise your hands if you are banging your head on the code format used by the other user. Alas! You are not alone. [Checkstyle][checkstyle] helps you setup a coding standard for your project. To enable checksytle integration in your build, say as part of maven build cyle you can use maven-checkstyle-plugin. The plugin can be configured to refer to a checkstyle file(rules for code format) and then provide warnings/errors as it parses your code.
6. Build properties and git properties
As mentioned here and here, you can add the build info and git info as properties file with spring-boot-maven-plugin and git-commit-id-plugin. Use these generated property files with swagger-ui or actuator as mentioned here.
7. Spotify dockerfile plugin
In the current situation many of us use docker as the container engine and deploy the same. Maintaining the docker file manually has to happen for every version. Also building & pushing the docker image would also be manual if the former is the case. However, with the spotify-maven-plugin, you can build and push docker image as part of the maven build cycle. Refer to the readme of the plugin for more info.
8. Modelmapper
It is a common convention to use DTO (Data transfer Object) to get input from user and return response to the user. However the spring boot application will deal with the entity objects internally. Adding converters could be a boring process and there is a high chance that you might have duplicated conversion code and it’s obviously prone to mistake. Modelmapper comes to the rescue in many cases for the above scenario.
9. Spring data jpa
Spring data jpa helps you write almost zero sql queries and minimal data retreival and storage code. It also helps enable automatic auditing on your entities.
That’s all for now folks!! I will update this post, if I come to know of additional add-ons.
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