CODEWITHSUNDEEP
gradlespring-boot
Martin Flower
Martin Flower

Reputation: 371

Spring Boot and Gradle (maven parent poms)

I am a Gradle user investigating adoption of Spring Boot.

I note from the answer to Spring Boot Gradle Tomcat 8 that Gradle has no equivalent of a "parent pom".

It appears that Spring Boot relies on the concept of parent poms.

My questions are

  1. How much of a problem is this going to be for me?

    What do I lose by not having a parent pom concept? Spring Boot is an opinionated framework - so, as long as I agree with the opinions, I lose nothing, but if I want Tomcat 8 instead of Tomcat 7, then it feels like I'm fighting the framework Is the Spring Boot proposition that users are strongly encouraged to follow the opinions, or is it more a quick-start foundation which users are encouraged to customise as they like? In what other areas will can I expect to run into problems?

  2. Does this problem point to a deficiency within Gradle

    Should Gradle be enhanced to have an equivalent of parent poms?

  3. As a Gradle user, is Spring Boot going to delight me - in the long term?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 2246

Answers (1)

Andy Wilkinson
Andy Wilkinson

Reputation: 116061

It's not true to say that Spring Boot relies on the concept of parent poms. As described in the documentation you can build a Spring Boot app using Maven without using Boot's spring-boot-starter-parent as the parent.

You should not run into any significant problems by choosing to build your Boot application with Gradle rather than Maven. While Boot provides a raft of sensible defaults for your application, it's also designed to get out of the way as quickly and easily as possible when those defaults aren't what you want.

It could be argued that the lack of dependency management is a deficiency of Gradle. It's something that we (the Spring Boot team) are looking at addressing. There are already ways around this limitation, such as the one described in the answer linked to in the question.

The spring.io website and reference application uses Spring Boot and is built with Gradle and it's proven to be an excellent choice for the application's needs. In short, I don't think a choice between Maven or Gradle will have much bearing on whether or not Spring Boot delights you.

Upvotes: 5

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