Happy Holidays, Frontends for Java Developers and What’s new in Spring Boot 3.2

Happy Monday and welcome to a special edition of the newsletter. Today is Christmas here in the Vega house so I want to start out by saying Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all of you out there. It’s hard to believe that we are 1 week away from the new year but here we are. I’m working on some blog posts / thoughts around how my year looked and what I plan on focusing on next year so stay tuned for that.

In today’s newsletter I want to talk to you about Frontend Development for Java Developers, What’s New in Spring Boot 3.2 and Upcoming Presentations.

Frontends for Java Developers

I am not just a Java developer, although that is what I consider myself most proficient in. I actually like to consider myself a polyglot developer and enjoy working with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, TypeScript, and more. There is something gratifying about building for the web and it’s been a passion of mine all throughout my career.

This made me contemplate the options available to Java developers when they need to develop a frontend for their application. I realize that this statement is quite broad, as different requirements call for different solutions to address specific problems.

I decided to sit down and start creating different scenarios or buckets, listing out available options. I like to use the application Excalidraw for this. When I was done, I had a wonderful idea: turning this into a live collaboration and allowing others to contribute. It was really great to see so many people jump in and add to it.

After everyone was done contributing to it I cleaned it up a bit. Some added other buckets like developing a CLI or Desktop Application in Java but I decided to narrow this down to building web applications. This is what we ended up with and I think this is a really great start.

My plan is to turn this into a blog post that the community can use as a resource to stay up to date with what options are available. If you have any thoughts on this or feedback I would love to hear from you.

What’s New In Spring Boot 3.2

I have been talking a lot about Spring Boot 3.2 lately and decided to sit down and write a blog post. Instead of simply duplicating the release notes, I want to highlight the major themes in this release: Runtime Efficiency, New Client Abstractions, and Observability Improvements.

Spring Boot 3 introduced runtime efficiency with features like Ahead-of-Time (AOT) compilation and support for creating GraalVM native images. In Spring Framework 6.1 and Spring Boot 3.2, we now have support for Java 21 and first-class support for Virtual Threads. Additionally, this release includes initial support for Project CRaC, which helps improve startup time.

I'm particularly excited about the new JDBC and REST Client features in this release. These two features will greatly benefit developers by providing easier and more fluent APIs, improving code readability and making coding more enjoyable.

Observability was a significant focus in Spring Boot 3.0. One of the key features was the Observability API, which allows both the framework and developers to add their own observations. In Spring Boot 3.2, support for a few annotations has been added, including @Observed. Previously, some configuration was required to enable this feature, but now, as long as the Spring Boot AOP Starter is on the classpath, it will work seamlessly.

I hope you enjoy reading the blog post, which can be found here.

Conferences in 2024

I am preparing for several conferences in the new year, and I am starting to feel really excited. If you are interested in staying up to date with my upcoming speaking engagements or accessing a list of past presentations, you can visit my speaking page.

CodeMash

When the new year begins, I will have two presentations at CodeMash in Sandusky, Ohio. I am excited to present on GraphQL and a new presentation on DevRel titled "The Developer Relations Playbook: How to build bridges by putting people first". I love this conference because I get to see my friend Chris Judd where he and Manifest Solutions puts on a great speaker dinner at a local pizzeria every year.

ConFoo

In February, I will be speaking at and attending my first ever ConFoo conference in Montreal, Canada. I am honored to have the opportunity to speak alongside many respected individuals in the community. I have heard only positive feedback about this conference, and I am thrilled to experience it firsthand. This week, I visited the conference's blog and was ecstatic to find my presentation listed there.

Great International Developer Summit (GIDS)

In April, I will be heading to India for the first time ever to attend and speak at the Great International Developer Summit. While browsing their website, I noticed that my talk is listed on the home page. It always serves as a reminder of how fortunate I am to be able to do what I love. I am also incredibly grateful and excited to reunite with old friends and make new acquaintances in India.

Around the web

📝 Articles

While we often refer to Project Loom as Virtual Threads it’s actually made up of a few different JEPs. I really enjoyed this article about Scoped Values which is an important piece to the Loom puzzle.

👨🏼‍💻 Conferences

The Java Champions Virtual Conference is coming in January and will be free 1/25/2024 - 1/30/2024. If you want to find out more about it you can check it out here.

✍️ Quote of the week

“It’s a funny thing about life, once you begin to take note of the things you are grateful for, you begin to lose sight of the things that you lack.”― Germany Kent

Until Next Week

I hope you enjoyed this newsletter installment, and I will talk to you in the next one. If you have any links you would like me to include please contact me and I might add them to a future newsletter. I hope you have a great week and as always friends...

Happy Coding Dan Vega [email protected]https://www.danvega.dev