Google is making it easier for Java developers to build applications using the Spring software programming model on its cloud platform.
The company on Aug. 8 announced general availability of Spring Cloud GCP 1.0 on its cloud platform.
The technology, developed in collaboration with Pivotal Research, will allow developers using GCP to more easily build Spring Boot applications, Mike Eltsufin, a Google software engineer and Ray Tsang, a Google developer advocate at the company, stated in an Aug. 8 blog.
“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,” they noted.
Spring is a framework for developing enterprise Java applications. It has been in existence several years and allows developers to use what are known in developer-speak as Plain Old Java Objects or POJO to develop Java applications for use in enterprise settings.
One of the framework’s core advantages is that it gives developers a way to more easily organize the various objects and classes that make up their Java application so they all work together coherently and as intended.
According to Pivotal Software, Spring can help speed up Java application development in microservices environments by making it easier for them to tie together disparate and distributed application components.
Spring Boot from Pivotal is a set of tools for building independent, self-contained Spring applications more quickly. It eliminates many of the tasks that developers normally need to perform when implementing dependencies between loosely coupled objects in Java apps.
Spring Cloud is built on Spring Boot and simplifies development and deployment of Java apps in distributed microservices environments. Spring Cloud provides a framework that makes it easier for developers to implement configuration management, service discovery, intelligent routing, distribution sessions and other capabilities in distributed apps.
Google’s new Spring Cloud GCP 1.0 includes several Spring Boot starter integrations—also known simply as starters—for automatically discovering credentials and for configuring services from Google’s cloud environment and other platforms.
Spring Boot starters are available for GCP services such as Cloud Pub/Sub messaging service, Cloud SQL, MySQL and other database services, Stackdriver Logging and Service Accounts for authentication.
Developers can use these starters to more easily add new capabilities to their applications, Eltsufin and Tsang stated in blog. For example, by adding the Spring Cloud GCP Logging dependency to their app, developers can ensure that application logs are stored automatically in Stackdriver logging.
Developers can enable also a distributed tracing capability for their applications by simply adding the Spring Cloud GCP Trace starter, the two Google managers wrote.
Google is currently working on adding similar Spring Cloud GCP integrations so to make it easier for developers to build applications that take better advantage of Google’s of cloud hosted services, they said.
Two examples of the new integrations are Spring Data Cloud Spanner for Google’s NoSQL database and Spring Cloud Config runtime configuration Application Programming Interface.