This blog post was co-written by Brian Cox, Colleen Green, and Michelle Sebek.
This year, VMware and the Spring open source community are celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Spring Framework and the 10th anniversary of Spring Boot. Few technologies stand the test of time. Remember 2003? Apple launched the iTunes Music Store, Tesla was founded, and the Spring project was formed. Spring is in great company!
Spring continues its momentum as the leading developer framework for Java and Kotlin with more than 50 percent annual growth for more than five years, according to internal analysis. Much of this success is due to the contributions of both the open source community of developers and other active members of the surrounding Spring ecosystem, including AWS, MongoDB, Redis, and GraphQL.
End of support for Java 8 and Spring Boot 2.x
As with any vibrant technology, both the Java and Spring communities saw the need to move on to new versions in order to best support user needs. As the owner of Java, Oracle is transitioning away from Java 8, stating “Oracle Java SE 8 reached its End of Public Updates in January, 2019. This means that Java SE 8 updates are no longer released publicly for Commercial use after January, 2019.” In its place, many industry observers are recommending standardizing on Java 17 given Oracle’s commitment to long-term support (LTS) for this version. The reason is that the lifetime of Java 17 is known upfront and is guaranteed to get updates for a longer time. The upgrade to the next LTS version can be scheduled well in advance, since the date is already known.
In line with this, the Spring community is ending support for older Spring Boot 2.x versions, which were tied to Java 8. In its place, the community is moving forward to Spring Boot 3.x.
Spring Solutions
As community support for Spring Boot 2.x ends in November 2023, Spring users might need assistance, training, or more time to transition to Spring Boot 3.
To address this, VMware is providing a collection of offerings known as Spring Solutions, which is composed of three separate elements:
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Spring Consulting services to assist with upgrades, migration, and app architecture
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VMware Spring Runtime, which includes an extended commercial support offering
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On-demand training and Spring certification preparation via the Spring Academy
Read more about Spring Solutions in our companion blog post.
Spring Consulting
VMware Spring Consulting provides end-to-end services for your Spring app portfolio, from architectural assessments to migrations to code creation. Spring Consulting helps customers mitigate the risk of running outdated versions of Spring Framework and/or Spring Boot by assisting with migration to the latest version. Spring Consulting experts will pair with your developers to accelerate the delivery of (or build and deploy) new Spring apps, enabling customers to take full advantage of the benefits of Spring.
Get a more in-depth look at the new Spring Consulting offering in our companion blog post.
VMware Spring Runtime
VMware Spring Runtime delivers 24-7 support for the Spring ecosystem, as well as packaged versions of popular projects designed for enterprise usage atop Kubernetes, such as OpenJDK and VMware tc Server.
As open source community support for prior versions of Spring Boot 2.x will end on November 18, 2023, VMware is offering commercial support for 2.x through February 2025 as part of the VMware Spring Runtime feature deliverables. This extension of commercial support after community support ends gives customers 15 additional months to upgrade to Spring Boot 3.
During this commercial support period, customers can take advantage of Spring Consulting services to work alongside their dev teams to help build the skills needed to accelerate the upgrade process. Furthermore, Spring Academy education services enable customers to provide their engineers with training resources on upgrading applications and upskilling. For more information on why customers should upgrade to Spring Boot 3.0, read this LinkedIn article by Nick Cayou.
As an added benefit, customers with a VMware Tanzu Application Service subscription are entitled to VMware Spring Runtime support for the Spring apps that run on Tanzu Application Service. Odds are high that if you are a longstanding VMware Tanzu customer, you’re already running Tanzu Application Service and several Spring apps and thus have Spring 2.x commercial support as part of VMware Spring Runtime on Tanzu Application Service. See the following blog by Nick Kuhn for more details. VMware Tanzu Application Platform customers may purchase VMware Spring Runtime for an additional fee.
Spring Academy
Introduced in January 2023, Spring Academy delivers on-demand training so you can invest in yourself and your understanding of the latest developments in the Spring ecosystem.
As part of helping with version migration and other learning needs, Spring Academy is rolling out four new offerings at SpringOne:
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Upgrading from Spring Boot 2.5 to 2.7 – Learn how upgrading from Spring Boot from 2.5 to 2.7 sets the stage for the ultimate goal of upgrading your Spring Boot applications to Spring Boot 3.x.
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Building Native Applications with Spring Boot and GraalVM – An introduction to high-performance, low-resource Spring Boot native images and GraalVM.
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Securing a REST API with OAuth 2.0 – Use Spring Security to build a secure REST API including risks inherent to REST APIs, authentication and authorization for a REST API, and how to integrate different secured technologies with Spring Security.
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Spring Batch Essentials – Learn the fundamental concepts of batch processing with Spring Batch as well as how to implement robust and fault-tolerant batch solutions.
The Spring Academy team has also created several short tutorials to help you learn new Spring skills. These Spring guides provide quick, hands-on experience for a variety of development tasks—from “Hello World” to solving specific problems—using the latest Spring project releases and techniques as recommended by the Spring team. The guides currently include: Accessing Data with JPA, Building an Application with Spring Boot, Building a RESTful Web Service, and Messaging with RabbitMQ.
To get started on your Spring learning journey, visit Spring Academy and sign up for a free membership today!
Spring Modulith 1.0
Lastly, the Spring engineering team is pioneering a new approach to simplify the process of building well-structured, domain-aligned Spring Boot applications. Spring Modulith was initiated as a Spring project in October 2022 and is now generally available in version 1.0.
Spring Modulith is an opinionated toolkit to build domain-driven, modular applications with Spring Boot. In the same way that Spring Boot has an opinion on the technical arrangement of an application, Spring Modulith implements an opinion on how to structure an app functionally and allows its individual, logical parts to interact with each other. As a result, Spring Modulith enables developers to build applications that are easier to update so they can accommodate changing business requirements over time.
As we mark the 20th anniversary of Spring and the 10th anniversary of Spring Boot, VMware and the Spring team are bringing a wealth of ways to keep Spring vibrant and to make it simpler to architect and easier to maintain. Join us in celebrating the next 20 years of Spring!
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