CraigWalls
Craig Walls is a Principal Engineer, Java Champion, Alexa Champion, and the author of Spring AI in Action, Spring in Action, and Build Talking Apps. He's a zealous promoter of the Spring Framework, speaking frequently at local user groups and conferences and writing about Spring. When he's not slinging code, Craig is planning his next trip to Disney World or Disneyland and spending as much time as he can with his wife, two daughters, 1 bird and 2 dogs.
The human-computer interface has changed a lot over the years. Keyboards, mice, and touchscreens to interact with desktop, web, and mobile applications. While all of these forms of UI are commonplace, they require that the human interact with the computer on the computer's terms. Humans interact with each other by talking and listening to each other. What if you could interact with applications the same way? The good news is that you can! Voice user interfaces do not aim to replace other forms of UI, but offer another choice that's natural and lends itself to moments when typing and tapping aren't as convenient or possible.
At its core, Spring is built on a dependency injection framework that enables (among other things) loose coupling of application components. But dependency injection is not the only way to achieve loose-coupling. Event-driven design, as its name implies, enables components to react to events, not knowing where they came from, process those events, and then publish new events not knowing who (if anybody) will be handling those events.
Although Java originally promised write once, run anywhere, it failed to fully deliver on that promise. As developers, we can develop, test, and build our applications into WAR or executable JAR files and then toss them over the wall to a Java application server and Java runtime that we have no control over, giving us zero confidence that the application will behave the same as when we tested it. Containers fulfill the write-once, run anywhere promise that Java wasn't able to, by packaging the runtime and even the operating system along with our application, giving greater control and confidence that the application will function the same anywhere it is run. Additionally, containers afford several other benefits, including easy scaling, efficiency in terms of resource utilization, and security by isolating containers from their host system and from other containers. While deploying Spring applications in containers has always been possible, Spring Boot makes it easier to containerize our applications and run them in container architectures such as Kubernetes. Spring Boot's support for containerization includes two options: Creating containers based on buildpacks or using layers as a means of modularizing and reducing the size of our application deployments. Moreover, new components in the Spring ecosystem can make your Spring applications Kubernetes-savvy so that they can take advantage of what a containerized architecture has to offer.
In a microservice architecture, the API Gateway pattern plays an important role, providing several benefits. It prevents clients from knowing anything about how the application is broken up into microservices or needing to know where those microservices can be accessed. It can optimize interactions with the backend services, by reducing the number of requests required to complete a task. It can act as the front line of security, ensuring that only authorized clients are able to access services. It can address service level requirements such as rate-limiting. And those are just a few benefits of an API gateway.
Zero fluff.