Spring Initializr updates include UI changes on top of developers’ wishlists

After the last Spring update, the community feedback was pretty unanimous about the missing list of dependencies. Developers wanted to see what’s available and Spring Initializr’s UI needed a whole lot of work on product discovery and user centered design. Now, start.spring.io should be easier than ever for developers to use!

Thanks to your comments, Spring has brought back the dependency list in a way that will help future improvements. There are also a few bug fixes for HTML/CSS issues and version incompatibility messages, but those are admittedly less exciting.

Architecture changes in Spring

Okay, not a lot has changed here. Spring is still made up of two parts: the Initializr library and the start.spring.io service instance.

However, things have been moved around a bit. The library contains the project generation logic and the web API. Spring Initializr provides an extensible API for developers to create quickstart projects with a configurable service. This simple web UI lets developers configure their projects with simple HTTP.

As for start.spring.io, not only does it have the specifics for the instance running in production, it also contains all of the web UI-specific code. Developers can bootstrap their application, configuring it to fit their needs based on language and Spring Boot versions. This should clarify things a bit for developers.

Basically, Spring is giving developers two great starting points for their projects. If you want to run something similar to start.spring.io, start the fork there. But if you’re writing your own web UI or working on core changes, Initializr is your best bet.

More information is available here.

SEE ALSO: Spring Framework 5.1 is here, with JDK 11 as its preferred long-term support

Community feedback

As a project that relies on community input, Spring relies on user feedback to see if they are on the right track. Currently, there is an online survey running! Feel free to give your input and help Spring meet future expectations with this essential part of the development ecosystem!

Spring wants to hear from you!

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