In the last several years, rapid web application frameworks have been most developers first choice when starting a new project. Rails and Grails have taken the concept of convention of configuration to extremes, eliminating boilerplate code, and allowing developers to create web applications more quickly than ever. The latest incarnation of Spring and its related tools go far in emulating this kind of productivity. Spring Boot and it’s related starter projects make creating a Spring application possible with just a few lines of code. With Spring Boot recently hitting it’s 1.0 release, and Spring 4 having just been released in December, it’s an exciting time to get reacquainted with an old stand-by framework and tool set. The Getting Started projects at Spring.io serve their purpose extremely well, but as they are only intended to get a project up and running, they leave much to be discovered. The individual tutorials are great, but I had a hard time finding something that put it all together into an app similar to what would be required in the real world. I’ve recently started a new project using Spring Boot and Spring 4 and hope to share some of my experiences to date in a series of posts.

Here are the topics I hope to cover in each part:

Part 1: Getting Started (again): Build A Web App With Spring Boot
Part 2: Adding Views Using Thymeleaf
Part 3: Form Binding
Part 4: Locale Support
Part 5: Spring Security