The Spring Pocket Guide

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About the author

Josh Long is a Spring Developer Advocate at Broadcom and has served as the first Spring Developer Advocate since 2010. An engineer, open-source contributor, and educator, he has helped tens of millions of developers reach production with cloud-native technologies such as Spring Boot, Spring AI, Cloud Foundry, and Kubernetes through his articles, videos, books, blogs, courses, and conference talks. Josh contributes to numerous open-source projects, including Spring Boot, Spring AI, Spring Cloud, Spring Integration, Spring Batch, Spring Modulith, JobRunr, Flowable, Vaadin, and MyBatis. He also runs the Coffee Software YouTube channel, and is a Java Champion, Kotlin GDE (alumnus), Microsoft MVP, and lifelong student of new and emerging technologies.

Preface

Spring has long been the backbone of modern Java development, empowering teams to build secure, scalable, and production-ready applications with confidence. From startups to global enterprises, developers rely on Spring to move quickly without sacrificing architectural integrity. By combining powerful abstractions with thoughtful defaults, Spring allows you to focus on business value while the framework handles the heavy lifting.

In this nano book, you will take a fast-paced journey through the essentials of modern Spring web development. Starting with project setup using Spring Boot and the Initializr, you will explore how to build HTTP APIs, model data with Spring Data JDBC, and expose services using REST, HATEOAS, GraphQL, and gRPC. Along the way, you will integrate PostgreSQL, consume external APIs, and see how Spring’s component model keeps applications clean, modular, and maintainable.

You will also dive into production-critical concerns such as security with Spring Security and OAuth 2, API gateways, configuration management, scalability with virtual threads, and performance optimization using GraalVM native images. Finally, you will explore how Spring AI, vector databases, tool calling, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) bring intelligent, AI-powered capabilities into modern applications.

By the end of this guide, you will understand not just how to build a Spring application, but also how to design systems that are secure, scalable, extensible, and ready for real-world production. Whether you are modernizing an existing system or starting fresh, Spring provides the foundation, and this book will help you use it with clarity and confidence.