New Book Review: "Spring Boot Messaging"
New book review for Spring Boot Messaging: Messaging APIs for Enterprise and Integration Solutions, by Felipe Gutierrez, Apress, 2017, reposted here:
When I first ran across this text, I debated whether it would make sense to acquire a copy for a recent client project of mine. As a relatively early adopter of Spring Boot in early-2015 before any books were available, and as someone who has been using Spring frameworks for quite some time, I questioned the possible value of working through a book. Don't get me wrong. When it makes sense, I often use books as starting points when available, and was known for quite some time amongst my colleagues for having read through (over a single weekend) the 700-page first edition of "Spring in Action" after being told by the technical staff at my then new employer that use of Spring was mandated for Java development.
Anyone new to the Spring Boot ecosystem needs to understand that "Spring Boot Messaging" is not the name of a Spring project. This book is an attempt by Gutierrez to bring a discussion of all messaging related Spring frameworks under one roof so to speak. And this aspect appealed to me. However, when I cracked open this book and flipped through it for the first time, my negative memories of circa Dot-com bubble technology texts surfaced. I'm not sure specifically why: perhaps the choice in fonts, perhaps the attempt at covering too many frameworks at once, perhaps the inclusion of code that seemed at first glance to be too disconnected from the discussion, or perhaps my realization that Spring Cloud Stream coverage is limited to only one chapter.
Soon afterward, I readied my copy of this book for return shipment, and dove into Spring reference materials and what the community provided with regard to examples and advice. In the meantime, I refrained from moving forward with the return in the case that I ended up determining that my initial judgment was faulty (it was). After understanding how the covered Spring projects are all interrelated, and exploring the code that the author provides in GitHub, my perspective changed. The coverage is actually decent, and for what it's worth this is really the only book available on these projects. And Spring Integration and related projects on which Spring Cloud Stream are built are in my opinion some of the most challenging Spring frameworks (the others being Spring Security and Spring Batch).
My focus here was on chapter 5 ("AMQP with Spring Boot"), chapter 8 ("Messaging with Spring Integration"), and chapter 9 ("Messaging with Spring Cloud Stream"), because I was looking to potentially adopt Spring Cloud Stream for a recent client project of mine, but wanted to understand some of the Spring magic that is often missing from community discussions. The higher level abstraction that Spring Cloud Stream provides on top of Spring AMQP, Spring Rabbit, and Spring Integration is convenient, but as with other frameworks it quickly becomes important to understand the underlying mechanisms. Expect to spend some significant time with the provided code examples, followed by what the Spring projects themselves and the community provide.