This document summarizes Tim Hobson's experiences using Spring Boot to develop QuickBooks Self-Employed. Some key points: - Spring Boot allowed for rapid prototyping and helped establish patterns early in development. The product launched on time with continuous new feature releases. - The lack of XML configuration, auto-configuration features, and starter dependencies significantly improved developer productivity. - Customizations were required for security, batch processing, testing mocks, and DevOps/monitoring but Spring Boot provided capabilities to support these needs. - Overall the experience with Spring Boot was very positive and enabled the QuickBooks Self-Employed product to successfully launch and scale.

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
Real-World Boot-Up Sequences:
QuickBooks Self-Employed
By Tim Hobson – Engineer @

2. About Me
• Software Developer with a bad habit of leveraging
frameworks
• Not a fan of re-inventing wheels every project
• Still believe you can move fast with good
architecture
2
so old

3. About Our Product
3
Providing financial management
and compliance solutions for the
Self-Employed in the US and
(soon) globally.
Launched this year and
continuously releasing new
functionality.
very new

4. Context – In the Beginning…
New to the world offering,
evolving product features
Be ready to pivot, pivot, and
pivot again
4
very
ambitious
0 customers, aspirations
of millions
0 lines of code
Aggressive timeline for
initial release
Proven scale-ability,
extensibility required
No legacy, but need to
establish patterns early
Dev/Ops Productivity
essential

5. My Requirements
5
such
needs

6. Powerful AND Simple?
6
?so
inconceivable

7. Tell us about your experiences with Spring Boot?
• No XML Config? No web.xml?
• Started prototyping with v0.5
• Bugs found, worked around
them
• Engaged with Spring Team
• Saw continual improvement
• …
7
such
promise

8. Growing Pains
• WAR-based deployment
• myBatis Spring
• Understanding magic (Source debugging)
• @Conditional* …
• Cost-benefit analysis of defying convention
• Security customizations
• Web Sockets through multiple routers, apache httpd
8
concern

9. Tell us about your experiences with Spring Boot?
Cont’d
• Decided to adopt and GO
• Great Success!
• In production since May
• Rolling out new features every few
weeks
• Just released mobile companion
apps
9
amaze

10. Observations on what made it work
• Sample apps, documentation
• Enthusiasm, Evangelism and Direction from the Spring team
• Accessible source code with tests you can run!
• Developer inclusion in the process – ideas, contributions, fixes
• Truly no xml configuration – ever, as promised
• Massively simplified POMs
• Developer productivity
• Magic
• I would take this framework with me…
10
wow

11. On The Shoulders of Giants…
• General
– @EnableAutoConfiguration
– @EnableConfigurationProperties
– YAML Configuration & Profiles
– “Starter” Dependency Management
– Boot Actuator
– ResourceBundleMessageSource
– @Aspect
– @EnableAspectJAutoProxy
– @EnableTransactionManagement
– @PersistenceContext
– @EnableJpaRepositories
– @Async
– @EnableAsync
• Web
– @EnableMvcSecurity
– @EnableWebMvcSecurity
– @EnableWebSocketMessageBroker
– @ControllerAdvice
– @ModelAttribute
– @ExceptionHandler
– SpringBootServletInitializer
• Batch
– CRaSH ssh
– @EnableBatchProcessing
– @EnableScheduling
– @Scheduled
– @Job
11
so
enabled

12. What we configured/overrode/extended/built
• General
• Data Migration (flywaydb)
• JpaVendorAdapter &
EntityManagerFactory
• Batch
• Always-on Batch process with @Scheduled
jobs
• On-demand batch job execution using
CRaSH groovy commands
• Security
• CSRF support for AngularJS
(HttpSessionCsrfTokenRepository)
• Custom Identity/Auth provider for Spring
Security
• Hybrid Thymeleaf + Angular UI
• REST Authentication/Authorization
• Session Expiry, Authentication Failure,
AccessDenied Handler
• Web
• Container Customization (error pages)
• Unsupported Browser handling
• JS Min/SASS Build integration for Maven
(exec-maven) calling compass and uglify
• Static asset versioning (git.properties)
12
such
customize

13. Dev/Ops
• Actuator security
• Custom HealthIndicator
• Custom Admin web console (leveraging Actuator
APIs, custom health checks) for ops and
customer support
• SLF4J Logging with Logback and Splunk-friendly
output
• Server-side error logging for Angular client
• On-demand user-level debug logging
• Memcache session storage to support
automated rolling deployments
13
very
sudo

14. Testing – Mocks and “System” Testing
14
@EnableAutoConfiguration
@Profile("test")
@Bean
public DataSource dataSource() {
return new EmbeddedDatabaseBuilder().setType(H2).build();
}
@ActiveProfiles("test")
@WebAppConfiguration
@SpringApplicationConfiguration(classes={ApplicationConfig.class, TestConfig.class})
…
public class UserControllerTest extends AbstractTestNGSpringContextTests {
private MockMvc mvc;
@BeforeClass
public void setUp() {
this.mvc = MockMvcBuilders.webAppContextSetup(this.context).build();
}
@Mock
private Authentication authentication;
…
@BeforeTest
public void setUp() {
MockitoAnnotations.initMocks(this);
}
such
ease

15. What’s Next?
15
Reactor
AMQP (RabbitMQ)
spring-session
Spring IO

16. Thanks!
Questions?
16
@hoserdude
@hoserdude
@hoserdude
hoserdude.com