News

Google Releases Spring Model for Java on Cloud

• By John K. Waters
• August 15, 2018

Google and the Spring Team at Pivotal just announced the general availability of Spring Cloud GCP 1.0, a joint project aiming to make life easier for Java developers building Spring Boot applications that consume GCP services.

The project does this by implementing familiar Spring idioms and abstractions to bring "the benefits of Spring and Spring Boot to Java developers using GCP services," explained Google software engineer Mike Eltsufin and developer advocate Ray Tsang, in a blog post. "This way, Spring Cloud lets Java developers write more maintainable applications with less boilerplate code and simpler configuration, and that are portable in a hybrid on-premises and cloud-based environment."

This release comes with several integrations, or "starters," designed to discover credentials automatically from the Google Cloud SDK, the runtime environment, or a custom location. These starters are also integrated with the Cloud Foundry open source cloud app platform and GCP Service Broker, so they can auto-configure services and access credentials from there.

Spring Boot is a rapid application development framework designed to simplify the development of stand-alone, production-grade, Spring-framework-based apps that run with little Spring configuration. Spring Boot is "opinionated" out of the box, so it encourages specific practices to increase ease of development. Spring Boot 2.0, the first major revision since Spring 1.0, which was released almost four years ago, was released in March.

The Spring Framework is one of the most popular Java application frameworks on the market today. It's a layered enterprise Java framework based on code published in Johnson's book Expert One-on-One Java EE Design and Development (Wrox Press, October 2002). He also wrote the first version of the framework.

"We're already working on more integrations based on community feedback, Eltsufin and Tsang wrote, "and we've recently released Spring Cloud GCP 1.1.0.M1, which has a preview of Spring Data Cloud Spanner and support for Spring Cloud Config."

Tsang and Pivotal's Spring advocate, Josh Long, have posted a video of their walkthrough of the Spring Cloud GCP project during Google Cloud Next 2018 event.