Claude 3e2029ab3a Add aot-cache module: the JDK 25 AOT cache on Spring Boot 4.1 vs AppCDS, Spring AOT and GraalVM native
A Spring Boot 4.1.1 order service started 12 ways (plain and extracted jar, Spring AOT output, AppCDS, AOT cache trained with and without traffic, JDK 27, native image), ten interleaved rounds each, with first-request latency; 24 cache-mismatch cases; Docker layer arithmetic. Transcripts are in output/ (no docs/ folder).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TF9JWFvJSNm6HVzswzZU5a
2026-09-24 16:44:16 +00:00

spring-boot-demo

Companion code for the Spring Boot articles on ankurm.com.

One directory per article. Each is a self-contained Maven project with its own README.md, numbered documentation chapters under docs/, and captured real output under docs/output/ that a single script regenerates. Every figure quoted in an article came out of one of those files.

Directory Article What it demonstrates
actuator-in-production/ Spring Boot Actuator in Production endpoint exposure defaults, securing Actuator, custom health indicators and how they hang
spring-boot-startup-time/ Why Your Spring Boot App Takes 8 Seconds to Start BufferingApplicationStartup, JFR startup events, self time vs total time, the classpath-scan tax, the JDK 25 AOT cache
configuration-properties/ @ConfigurationProperties vs @Value in Spring Boot 4 relaxed binding measured three ways, record constructor binding, validation, IDE metadata generation
profiles-and-config/ Spring Boot Profiles Done Right the precedence stack made visible, config trees and ConfigMaps, why a profile file loses to an environment variable
spring-aop/ Spring AOP Explained every pointcut designator with real matches, JDK vs CGLIB proxies, six aspects that do not fire
docker-images/ Dockerizing Spring Boot 4: Layered Jars, Buildpacks, Distroless and Image Size Benchmarks one service packaged nine ways and measured: size on disk and pushed, rebuild delta, startup, PID 1 and signals, jlink, the JDK 25 AOT cache
kubernetes-deployment/ Deploying Spring Boot 4 on Kubernetes probe groups under a dependency outage, graceful shutdown under load four ways, JVM ergonomics per pod shape, CPU limits throttling GC, HPA on a Micrometer metric
problem-details/ Global Exception Handling with ProblemDetail (RFC 9457) in Spring Boot 4 thirteen failures under five handling setups, validation errors, i18n, content negotiation, errors outside MVC, silent 500s, decoding on the client
resilience/ Spring Framework 7's Built-in Resilience: @Retryable, @ConcurrencyLimit, and What's Left for Resilience4j @Retryable and @ConcurrencyLimit counted invocation by invocation, retries inside transactions, where Resilience4j still earns its place, migrating from Spring Retry
resilience4j-circuit-breaker/ Resilience4j Circuit Breaker in Spring Boot 4.1: What It's Still For the circuit breaker verified through trip/open/half-open/recover, spring-boot-starter-aop renamed to spring-boot-starter-aspectj (not removed), and where Resilience4j still beats Framework 7's own @Retryable/@ConcurrencyLimit
observability/ A Practical Guide to Monitoring Spring Boot Microservices: Prometheus, Grafana, and Boot 4.1's OpenTelemetry Starter real metrics and traces pushed via OTLP to a real grafana/otel-lgtm container, Docker Compose auto-wiring the endpoint with zero management.otlp.* properties, @Observed silently inert without an explicit ObservedAspect bean, and a dual-version (Boot 4.0 vs 4.1) proof of which OTEL_* environment variables are genuinely new
caching/ The Spring Cache Abstraction: @Cacheable, @CacheEvict, Key Generators and the Self-Invocation Trap the self-invocation trap measured four ways, the key collision SimpleKeyGenerator makes easy, eviction timing under a thrown exception, a rollback the cache keeps, and where this sits next to Hibernate's L2 cache
redis/ Redis with Spring Boot 4.1: RedisTemplate, StringRedisTemplate, @RedisHash, Pub/Sub and TTL the default JDK-serialised RedisTemplate writing keys redis-cli cannot read, before and after Jackson 3 serializers (class names read with javap, the @class allow-list), the six keys two @RedisHash entities create, expired hashes leaving index entries behind unless keyspace events are on, @RedisListener on Boot 4.1's auto-configured container, a plain set clearing a TTL, and a RedisCacheConfiguration bean silently overriding spring.cache.redis.time-to-live
spring-batch/ Spring Batch on Boot 4.1: Jobs, Steps, Chunk Processing and Restartability a job that fails mid-chunk and resumes exactly where it left off across two separate JVMs, skip vs. restart on the same poisoned row, the resourceless job repository that forgets a restart ever happened, and the chunk(int) vs chunk(int, tx) builder split
spring-batch-partitioning/ Spring Batch Partitioning and Parallel Steps: Scaling a 10-Million-Row Job the real grid-size sweep at 10M and 300K rows (best speedup 1.42x, on 2 cores), MultiResourcePartitioner ignoring gridSize entirely, a rejected partition's StepExecution stuck at STARTING forever, and Spring Batch 6.0's new JobOperator#recover unsticking it
db-migrations-flyway-liquibase/ Flyway vs Liquibase for Spring Boot 4: Migrations, Rollbacks and Baselines Flyway Community's undo throwing FlywayRedgateEditionRequiredException at runtime, a real Liquibase 5.0.3 filename-caching defect that produces a phantom successful run, Liquibase's 10-second default lock-poll rate versus Flyway's near-instant row lock, the FSL license change and its ASF/Keycloak fallout, and what actually happens when both tools are enabled against one database
db-migrations-expand-contract/ Zero-Downtime Database Migrations: Expand-Contract in Practice with Spring Boot a real 4-deploy rolling sequence against two live replicas with a load generator proving 99.98% success, H2's AUTO_SERVER single-point-of-failure trap, a NOT NULL constraint that fails every Stage 4 insert, and ALTER TABLE silently dropping a concurrently committed row with no exception thrown
openapi-versioning/ springdoc-openapi with Spring Boot 4.1: Generating, Customising and Versioning Your API Spec springdoc 3.1.1 silently merging same-path, different-version handlers into one oneOf operation with an arbitrary operationId, a working per-version fix with GroupedOpenApi + OpenApiCustomizer, and the officially-versioning-supported functional-endpoint path turning out to document only one of two registered versions
graphql-dataloader/ Spring GraphQL 2.0: Schema-First APIs, DataLoader Batching and Killing N+1 a naive @SchemaMapping resolver measured at 21 SQL statements for 20 books versus a @BatchMapping resolver's flat 2, a dangling foreign key nulling an entire GraphQL response via non-null propagation identically under both resolver strategies, and two Spring Boot 4.1 packaging changes (DataSourceAutoConfiguration's new package, Jackson 3 by default) hit along the way
custom-validation/ Custom Validation in Spring Boot: Beyond the Basics! the javax.validation to jakarta.validation namespace fix Boot 3 already required, Jakarta Validation 3.1's record-validation clarification proven on both field- and class-level custom constraints, a record validation failure's empty 400 body by default, and what spring.mvc.problemdetails.enabled does and does not fix
etag-caching/ Mastering Cache Control with ETag in Spring Boot RESTful APIs spring-boot-starter-web's own POM now reading "deprecated in favor of spring-boot-starter-webmvc", ShallowEtagHeaderFilter and WebRequest.checkNotModified() re-verified unchanged on Spring Framework 7, deep cache vs shallow cache, and conditional PUT with If-Match as optimistic locking
restclient-basic-auth/ Spring Boot RestTemplate with Basic Auth: A Modern Guide RestClient with Basic Auth two ways against a real embedded server, {noop} passwords confirmed to emit no runtime warning at all, spring-boot-starter-restclient as its own required Boot 4 module, and the RestClient.exchange() trap covered in depth by the RestTemplate to RestClient migration guide
core-di/ Dependency Injection in Spring Boot 4: Constructor vs Setter vs Field (and Why Field Injection Hurts) and @Autowired Explained: By-Type Resolution, @Qualifier, @Primary, ObjectProvider and List Injection one OrderService in three injection styles built with plain new, a field-injected dependency used in a constructor, circular dependencies in plain Spring vs Boot with the real failure report, @Lazy injecting a proxy, and the @Autowired resolution ladder read from Spring 7.0.9 bytecode (name match beats @Priority), plus the empty-collection trap that only bites field and setter injection
core-beans/ Spring Bean Scopes: Singleton, Prototype, Request, Session and the Prototype-in-Singleton Trap Spring Bean Lifecycle in Boot 4: @PostConstruct, InitializingBean, SmartLifecycle and Shutdown Order and Circular Dependencies in Spring Boot 4: Why Startup Fails and 4 Ways to Fix It instance counts per scope, five fixes for a prototype inside a singleton, request scope without a proxy failing at start-up, every lifecycle callback in order, @PostConstruct running before the proxy exists, SmartLifecycle phases measured, a SmartLifecycle at the default phase stopping before Tomcat has drained, and the circular-dependency start-up failure reproduced with four fixes
custom-starter/ Write Your Own Spring Boot 4 Starter: Auto-Configuration, @Conditional and Properties a starter split into an auto-configuration module and a starter, the AutoConfiguration.imports registration, @ConditionalOn* conditions, configuration metadata, and tests with ApplicationContextRunner
core-events/ Spring Application Events: @EventListener, @TransactionalEventListener and Async Events publishing and consuming events, listener ordering, conditional listeners, AFTER_COMMIT behaviour proven with a rollback, and async listeners
multi-datasource/ Multiple DataSources in Spring Boot 4 with Spring Data JPA two H2 databases each with its own DataSource, Flyway, EntityManagerFactory and transaction manager, six ways of getting the wiring wrong, plain vs named @Transactional, and ChainedTransactionManager under a failing commit
i18n/ Internationalization (i18n) in Spring Boot 4: MessageSource, LocaleResolver and Localized ProblemDetail English, Marathi and Hindi message bundles, Accept-Language vs a cookie resolver, apostrophes and Devanagari digits in MessageFormat, the JVM default locale as a hidden fallback, localized validation messages and ProblemDetail titles
aot-cache/ Faster Spring Boot Startup with the JDK AOT Cache (JEP 514/515): Benchmarks vs CDS and Native the JDK 25 AOT cache trained two ways, against a plain JVM, AppCDS, Spring's own AOT output and a GraalVM native image (ten interleaved rounds each), first-request latency, 24 cases where the cache silently stops applying (jar, timestamp, JVM build, ZGC, compact headers), -XX:AOTMode=on, Docker layer arithmetic

core-di, core-beans, custom-starter, core-events, multi-datasource, i18n and aot-cache are the exception: they have no docs/ folder. Their deeper material lives in collapsible sections inside the articles themselves, and their captured output sits in a top-level output/ directory instead of docs/output/.

Articles whose text is kept here rather than only on the blog have it under <directory>/post/ — post.md for the body and meta.md for the title, excerpt and categories.

Running any of them

Each project needs a JDK 25 and Maven 3.9. redis also needs redis-server and redis-cli on the PATH. docker-images and observability also need Docker, and kubernetes-deployment Docker plus a Kubernetes cluster; their READMEs list the rest:

cd <directory>
export JAVA_HOME=/path/to/jdk-25
mvn -DskipTests package
./scripts/run-all.sh          # regenerate every transcript under docs/output/

Licence

MIT — see LICENSE.

S
Description
Spring Boot 4 Actuator in production: every endpoint, securing it, separate management port, and custom health indicators for DB/Kafka/external API. Companion repository for ankurm.com.
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