5 Essential Requirements for a Spring Boot Application in Production

Spring Boot is an extremely useful framework to build Java applications. With Spring Boot, even teams with less experience in the Spring framework can deliver business value faster. 

Some of the great things about Spring Boot are as follows:

1. Auto Configuation - Basically Spring Boot autoconfigures dependencies just by looking at the class path. It uses sensible defaults and makes a lot of choices on its own that are mostly battle-tested.

2. Starter Modules - Spring Boot comes with a bunch of starter modules. Each starter module basically supports a feature. This makes it easy to plug and play with new features. You simply include the package in a POM or Gradle file and Spring Boot will try to provide you with that feature. It also simplifies the POM or Gradle files from a dependency management point of view.

However, to make sure a Spring Boot application is production-ready, certain additional things are needed based on the requirements of the task or project.

Let's look at them.

Handling RESTful HTTP End Points

Typically, Spring Boot applications are used to expose RESTful APIs based on your domain model.

Therefore, more often than not, a Spring Boot application needs to have clean REST Controllers implemented.

These controllers should handle various HTTP methods such as GET, POST, PUT, DELETE and others depending on the domain model.

Exception Handling

For any production level application, it is extremely important to handle exceptions properly. Without proper exception handling, the user experience of your application can go for a toss.

Error messages should be customized, the error response should be clearly defined and try to make the user take appropriate action.

Exception Handling in Spring Boot is quite easy to setup. Of course, there are a few nuances that need to to handled for doing it efficiently.

Validations

Validations are another indispensable aspect of any application. The same goes for a production-level Spring Boot application. 

Without proper validations, incorrect or faulty data can make its way into your application database and create unforeseen issues. Spring Boot provides excellent approach to perform bean-level validations. There is basically no reason to not use this approach.

Documentation

If you are using Spring Boot for building REST APIs, documentation of those API interfaces is really important. Without proper documentation, consumers will not be willing to use your APIs.

Also, maintaining documentation across changes in the interface is also an important requirement. 

Thankfully, Spring Boot provides excellent integration with Swagger. You can configure Swagger with your Spring Boot applications to provide out-of-the-box documentation of your interfaces. Moreover, each time you make a change and rebuild your application, the documentation also gets updated. 

Audit Logging

Most of the time, our Spring Boot applications talk to a database table. It would read records as well as create or update records in the table.

In a typical production environment, it is often the case that we need to keep an audit trail of everything that is happening on a particular record of the table. This requirement could be for audit purposes or analytics.

Here, Spring Boot can easily integrate with Hibernate Envers. With just a few basic configuration settings, you can setup your audit tables to keep track of all the changes happening on your main table.

Conclusion

The beauty of Spring Boot is that it is easy and efficient to bring a typical Spring Boot application to production standards. Most of the time, there are already great packages available which provide these integrations.

All of this saves a developer's time and increase efficiency.