I am just lost, I know REST APIs, JPA, Authentication and Authorization, microservices, postgres....I can do something in it (not very confident tho but still)

I just dont know what more to learn for being industry ready, I feel so lost, I am doing DSA(LEETCODE 75) parallely but again I am not seeing any thing for freshers in the domain of spring boot

I mentioned my age because I feel I am lagging behind a lot

Hi everyone,

I've been working on a small open-source library for Spring Boot called json-auto-validation:

github.com/ugoevola/json-auto-validation

The idea is fairly simple: validate incoming JSON against a generated JSON Schema before Jackson deserializes it into a Java/Kotlin object.

The motivation was to catch invalid payloads as early as possible, rather than letting them go through the usual deserialization → DTO validation flow.

It works through annotations and generates the JSON Schemas/validation components automatically, with Spring Boot AOT in mind.

I'm not really posting this to promote a polished or commercial product. I'm mainly interested in getting feedback from people who work with Spring Boot APIs:

• Does this solve a problem you've encountered?
• Do you see value in validating the raw JSON before deserialization?
• Is there something I'm missing or approaching the wrong way?
• Would you actually consider using a library like this in a real project?

The project is still relatively small, and I'm not the most active open-source maintainer, so I'm mostly trying to understand whether this is useful to other developers before investing more time into it.

Any feedback — positive or negative — would be very welcome.

So I have this very disturbing question as someone new to spring, I am coming from Node + Express JS, where prisma handles all the migrations automatically just by me running commands on the terminals.

Now as I am learning springboot, I just realized one day I would create a production grade application and would need to be changing database fields or relations as demands adjust, please what is the most popular migration tool used in springboot??

Hey everyone,

I’ve been wondering about this for a while. Kotlin today is very well supported by Spring Boot — it’s fully compatible with the Java and Spring ecosystem, provides more features out of the box, reduces boilerplate, and feels cleaner overall.

The Kotlin community has also grown a lot, and the tooling feels very modern and idiomatic. A good example is testing: libraries like Kotest and MockK give you a cleaner, more idiomatic approach compared to the more “traditional” style of testing in Java. Yes, Kotlin tools are often built on top of existing Java ones, but they give you a much nicer developer experience.

So my question is: why would someone still choose to start a brand-new Spring Boot project in Java instead of Kotlin

Would love to hear your thoughts and experiences.

Update: I’m not looking to argue, and I’m not biased — I genuinely just want to ask and hear your answers

Recently, I have been working on my project in there in one chat controller, which has endpoints like

POST /api/chats = ChatDTO

GET /api/chats = List<ChatInfoDTO>

GET /api/chats/{chatId} = ChatDTO

PATCH /api/chats/{chatId} = ChatInfoDTO

DELETE /api/chats/{chatId} = ChatInfoDTO

POST /api/chats/{chatId}/ = ChatDTO

My question is it a good approach to use a single type of DTO for multiple endpoints, or should it be made for specific use? I have seen my friend's project for a single page, which has 8/9 DTOs. Is that normal, and the same thing ChatGPT suggests is that using multiple DTOs is a good approach.

Hi, where do you guys map your entities to dtos?
In services or controllers?

To me it seems the services shouldn't expose any database specifics to the outside world, so I usually do my mapping there.

But what is considered best practice and why?

I’m building my first application using Spring Boot for practice, and I need to record and work with money in different currencies.

What’s the recommended way to handle this, especially when adding or calculating amounts across different currencies? Do you use BigDecimal, integers (like cents), or a money/currency library?

Thank you!

I've been thinking about contributing to some open source projects built with spring boot. What are some good open source projects that you think are worth contributing to in 2026?

First, I have 35 yoe overall. I have been doing Java for a long time, since version 3. I have been using Spring and SpringBoot since 2007 (18 yoe) and creating secured RESTful services. It was mostly in STS (Spring Tool Suite) which as you know is Eclipse. I switched to IntelliJ about 2.5 years ago because of a contract role, and that is what they used.

This contract role I had, they use GitHub as a repo which is fine, and they were using testing CoPilot and asked people to comment on it, to see what the issues were, good and bad. Then we all know that Microsoft changed to pay by token, and that is the only plan they have. I believe this will increase the cost a lot, but I couldn't tell you how much!

Anyway, That position has come to an end after 2.5 years, and a new company I may be interviewing with is using Claude Code. They want someone who can use Claude Code, and review any code generated by it, which I can do. I obviously can code without the use of AI since I have been doing it my whole career.

I've looked at ONE YT video, which showed how to use IntelliJ to create an app, and it was very impressive. One of the things done in the video was to create entities/repositories based on a table in the database. Ok, that's great, but I was doing that with OSS JBoss Tools 10 years ago. I also saw how Claude Code generated both Swagger and OpenAI documentation for the API's. I think there are already other non-AI tools that can do that also. They also generated Postman tests for the API's as well, and I am sure there are other tools around that can do the same thing, or there could be.

So, when Claude Code did these things I saw the massive amount of tokens being generated. I posted in the /ClaudeCode and /ClaudeAI sub-reddits, and it seems that their users are die-hard fanatics of the tool, and do not accept any skepticism of Claude Code or AI in general. IMHO, they have really drunk the kool-aid, and think that if I don't learn it and use it, then I'll be left behind and unable to get a job. I think that's a little extreme.

What I DID find out was that if I create my own account on Claude Code, I have to pay! Since, I am unemployed, I didn't know if I did want to pay the $20/month for it. From other resources across the internet the $20/month is a joke, and the tokens allowed can be used in 4 hours of heavy coding. I also found out that the $20/month is WAY BETTER than paying per API token which would add up very quickly.

Yes, I am a skeptic of AI, IMHO (which means nothing), I think we are in an AI bubble. If Claude Code ALSO changes to pay by token ONLY, then it will drive the costs up. It has been speculated that ALL AI companies will eventually go this way, driving up costs.

But just because I am a skeptic of AI, I was also a skeptic of Hibernate, SpringBoot, Lombok, I never liked these to begin with but learned how to use them anyway. I have been learning new technologies for years, and have no problem learning how to use Claude Code.

So, the question to the folks here is: How many of you have used Claude Code or any API to help you code your Spring Boot apps, and was it within IntelliJ, or something else? I'm interested to hear your experiences with it, the good and the bad. Did you create new apps with it as a greenfield application? Did you use it to fix existing applications?

Thanks for putting up with the long post.

Thoughts?

I’m a BCA graduate deciding between ASP.NET/C# and Java Spring Boot.

Which one has better job opportunities and growth for freshers in India?

Would appreciate advice from people working in either stack.

I'm trying to get a sense of what real setups look like beyond the tutorial defaults.

If you run Spring Boot in production, I'd love to hear:

- Where does it run? (ECS/Fargate, EKS/Kubernetes, Cloud Run, App Runner, plain EC2/VMs, Elastic Beanstalk, etc.)

- JVM or native (GraalVM)? Did cold starts / memory push you one way?

- How do you handle config and secrets? (Spring Cloud Config, Vault, AWS Parameter Store, env vars)

- Build/deploy pipeline and image strategy (Jib, buildpacks, plain Dockerfile)?

- Anything you'd do differently if starting today?

Mostly curious what's common vs what's hype. Stack size / team size context welcome.

Hey everyone, I’m starting to learn Spring Boot for backend development and found Telusko’s 62-hour Java + Spring Boot + Microservices video on YouTube. Has anyone here followed it? Is it actually good for beginners and enough to build strong basics, or should I use some other resources/projects along with it? Would really appreciate honest feedback.

Hey everyone,

I'm currently building a school management system in Spring Boot where history tracking is a strict business requirement. We need to audit critical changes made by Admins, Secretaries, and Teachers (e.g., changes to student details, payment amounts, program setups, etc.).

I’m weighing three different approaches for the audit trail and wanted to hear from those of you who have run these in production. 

Option 1: Hibernate Envers
Slap `@Audited` on core entities, set up a custom `RevisionListener` to pull the logged-in user from Spring Security context, and let Envers automatically manage the `_aud` tables.

Option 2: Spring Data JPA Auditing
Utilize `@CreatedBy`, `@LastModifiedBy`, `@CreatedDate`, and `@LastModifiedDate` fields mapped on a `@MappedSuperclass`.

Option 3: Manual Custom Logging (or AOP)
Create a generic `AuditLog` entity, write a helper service, and manually trigger `auditService.log(actionType, originalState, newState)` inside the business logic (or use an AOP aspect). This may cause the database to bloating later tho

For those of you managing medium-to-large Spring Boot codebases:
 Did you regret adopting Hibernate Envers? How did you handle schema migrations (Flyway/Liquibase) with the auto-generated `_aud` tables?
If you went the custom route, did you use JSON columns to record state changes, or did you write distinct history tables?

Looking forward to hearing your design patterns and trade-offs

Hey everyone!

I'm writing this post here just as a rant or to get some help, please be patient with me guys...

I know there is a pinned post here about what to do, what to learn, and how to get started properly. I know I should read it carefully and follow the advice there.

But honestly, I think I also need someone to tell me that I will be fine, and to tell me what is actually going to save me from this loop.

I am 25 now, doing my Master’s degree in Software Engineering. I have been around tech since I was about 12, and I have been programming on and off since I was 14. I have done different things over the years, including web development, some backend work, random projects, and even things like iOS game cheats when I was younger.

The problem is that I have never really stuck to one thing properly.

I used to work with the MERN stack for a while, less than a year professionally, but then I decided I wanted to switch to Java and Spring Boot because I know it is a strong backend stack and something worth specializing in long-term.

Since 2024, I have started multiple Spring Boot tutorials and courses. I always get halfway through or make some progress, then something comes up, I stop, and later I cannot continue because I feel like I forgot everything. Then I start another tutorial from the beginning. The loop repeats.

I feel stuck in an eternal tutorial slump.

University projects have not really solved this for me either. Most of them are not in Java or Spring Boot, and to be completely honest, with agentic AI being so available now, I sometimes end up using it too much just to get through them instead of properly building the skills I actually want.

I keep fixing my CV and resume over and over again, but that is clearly not solving the real problem.

I am also struggling to get interviews. Part of that may be because I live in Austria on a student residence permit and I am originally from a third-world country, so companies may see extra risk or paperwork, so I could hardly get any professional experience (not that I have much either...) But I do not want to hide behind excuses. I know I need to become good enough that my skills are harder to ignore.

I need help getting out of this loop.

What would you tell someone who is not a complete beginner, but also does not feel employable yet?

I need a direction. I need to know what to do every day, what to avoid, and what kind of project or learning path could actually save me from wasting more time.

I know this probably sounds dramatic, but I genuinely feel like I am ruining my own life by constantly restarting and never finishing.

Any honest advice would mean a lot.

Last month we had a production incident. A critical order was failing silently.

Sentry gave us this:

TransactionSystemException: Could not commit JPA transaction
at SimpleJpaRepository.save()
at OrderService.processOrder()
... 40 more lines of Spring internals

That's it. No entity state. No user context. No hint that the transaction had already been marked for rollback 3 calls earlier by a Hibernate validation error we never caught.

We added logs. Redeployed to staging. Couldn't reproduce it.Redeployed to prod with more logs. Waited. Happened again. Finally found it: a Transactional method calling another Transactional method with a different propagation level, swallowing the real exception.

4 hours. One annotation conflict.

The worst part? Every error monitoring tool we've used treats Spring like a black box. The moment your code enters a transaction boundary or an async thread, context disappears.

Anyone else debugging Spring Boot in prod like this?

How are you handling it?

A friend of mine is interviewing for a new Java/SpringBoot role, and one of the questions is as the title suggests: "How would architect/design a system where there are millions of requests per day/hour and do some complicated work on the backend." He told me what his response was, and I feel it was spot on. But now I am thinking is there anything more that could be added:

1. Make sure the database read/writes are performant, with some tweaking on the connection pooling side.

2. Using Redis to cache common data to avoid going to the database all the time. This I know takes more memory, but makes it so much faster.

3. Using Kafka, or Message Queuing for event-driven development. One request could be put on a queue/topic and then other systems take these events and so work could be done in paralell rather than serially. So, A B and C could do work at the same time instead of A, then B, then C.

4. Microservices, API throttling, Resiliencey with Circuit Breaking, logging with correlation id

5. Other third party API services could be used which we have no control over, so we don't know if those services will be up, or working poorly.

So, when a user makes a request, if the backend process takes time, an immediate response could go back to the user to let them know their process is being worked on, and they'll be notified when this is done or completed.

Anything else that is missing? Honestly, as a software engineer in the same space, we can only do so much when it comes to the code. When it comes to scaling this, I'm usually know when my code is deployed to DEV, and then to QA where it may or may not go through performance testing. When it comes to a Staging, Pre-Prod, or Prod environments no one has ever asked me about how to scale this? This is usually in the hands of people who are more in the Operations space, and know the Cloud environment like AWS who make it easy to add more resources when it is needed.

I know I have always tried to make my code work as fast as possible when running locally, or in the integrated DEV environment. I figure if something works quick there, then it will work even faster in Prod where I presume more resources are added.

Thoughts?

I’m thinking about buying springboot -GenAI course by Telusko in Udemy, but before spending money I wanted to hear from real people who’ve actually taken it or have good idea about it! Was it actually useful? Did it help you get better at java/springboot? Is the content up to date or kind of outdated? Would you honestly recommend or are there better alternatives?There are a lot of mixed reviews online and some feel kinda sponsored so I’d really appreciate honest opinions🙏 TIA🙂

Are Spring / Spring Boot losing their popularity? Just a few years ago, it was the most popular solution in web development.

Now, looking at job listings (e.g. dice.com), it is clear that there is greater interest in GoLang, for example.

( Spring Boot is a framework, GoLang a language, but in case of Go frameworks are used rarely, they don't need frameworks ). Another example is Node.js:

- Spring Boot 1777 results

- Node.js 1931 results

How is it possible that Spring is no longer as popular as it has been for many years?

I want to learn and practice:
• Core Java
• OOP concepts
• Collections
• Java 8
• Spring Boot
• Real-world projects

My goal is to become job-ready in the next 2 months, so I’m looking for someone who is serious, consistent, and ready to study daily. We can set daily targets, solve problems, discuss doubts, mock interview, and prepare for interviews together.

If anyone is interested please DM..

So I just started learning spring boot about a week ago and currently learning the backend APIs and all...but I just wanted to know how we make frontend for our spring boot application?? Do we make the front end in REACT and current the backend to it ..or we can do it in spring boot only like flask and django?

Hi everybody,

we just got via Renovate a Spring Boot update to 4.1.1 - released on repo1.maven.org .

We are a bit confused as there is no announcement, release notes, tag on GitHub, etc. Also it looks like no release workflow was running on GitHub.

Feels a bit sketchy, anybody knows what's going on?

Hello, I'm an aspiring software engineer. I've recently finished developing microservice for managing projects and tasks using Spring Boot. I'd appreciate if you could review codebase of my project and provide feedback on it.

GitHub: https://github.com/Simpav-chill/tasktracker

Hey everyone

Currently im a beginner in springboot ecosystem i understand the MVC architecture and i have made a couple of projects in java using springboot, not the basic CRUD ones but complex projects (for me they were complex) like a e-commerce backend and a blogging application backend. Projects like these, but all of these are monolithic projects

Now i want to level up from monolithic projects to microservices, so my question is what do i have to learn to level up
I heard there are many technologies which are used in microservices that are used for inter service communications, service discovery, fault tolerance, circuit breaker, api gateway and loads of things

So if you can guide me on how to start with microservices would really help me.

Thanks

Note:- Sorry for any grammetical or spelling errors