My Journey Through the Spring Ecosystem
Published on April 25, 2025JavaBackendMicroservices
"Spring didn't just teach me Java frameworks—it reshaped how I think about scalable, maintainable systems."
🌱
Starting with Spring Boot
Core Strengths
- •Auto-configuration that adapts to your dependencies
- •Embedded servers (Tomcat, Netty, Jetty)
- •Starter POMs for painless dependency management
First Project Stats
- →3 days to production-ready REST API
- →80% less XML than traditional Spring
- →12 auto-configured beans used
What I Built
- User auth system with JWT
- CRUD API with Hibernate validation
- PDF generation endpoint
Key Takeaways
- Convention over configuration = faster dev
- Test slices (@WebMvcTest) are game-changers
- Spring DevTools enable rapid iteration
🔐
Spring Security Deep Dive
Authentication Flow
1️⃣
Request Intercepted
AuthenticationFilter checks for credentials
2️⃣
Provider Manager
Delegates to configured AuthProviders
3️⃣
UserDetailsService
Loads user from database (or other source)
4️⃣
Security Context
Stores authenticated principal
JWT Implementation
- •
JJWTlibrary for token handling - •Custom
OncePerRequestFilterfor validation - •Refresh token rotation strategy
Common Pitfalls
- •CSRF protection with JWT
- •Proper exception handling
- •Role vs. permission granularity
☁
Spring Cloud Architecture
Microservices Toolbox
🔍
Eureka
Service discovery
⚙️
Config
Centralized config
🔄
Feign
Declarative REST clients
🛡️
Gateway
API routing
💥
Resilience4j
Circuit breaking
📊
Sleuth
Distributed tracing
"Spring Cloud turns the complexity of distributed systems into manageable abstractions."
Service Communication
RestTemplate
- •Traditional synchronous calls
- •Manual load balancing
WebClient
- •Reactive non-blocking IO
- •Better for high concurrency
Feign
- •Declarative interface
- •Integrates with Ribbon
💡
Key Lessons
Do's
- ✓Use
@SpringBootTestsparingly - ✓Leverage Spring Profiles
- ✓Monitor with Actuator endpoints
Don'ts
- ✗Overuse
@Autowired - ✗Ignore connection pooling
- ✗Skip proper exception handling
Where I'm Heading Next
Exploring reactive programming with WebFlux and optimizing with Spring Native + GraalVM.
Project ReactorRSocketGraalVM
Spring Journey
Spring Stats
Boot Startup Time1.8s
Avg for simple REST service
JPA Queries Optimized-70%
After N+1 fixes