Andrew Clement and Sebastien Deleuze contributed to this post.
Spring Native—which provides support for compiling Spring Boot applications into native executables with GraalVM—was released as a public beta back in March. Since then, we have had incredible community feedback and participation; the project has already gotten more than 2,100 Github stars and close to 250 forks! Meanwhile, in the recently concluded State of Spring Survey 2021, 94 percent of respondents said they were aware of Spring Native, and 22 percent of Spring developers were already using Native on a project or evaluating it. And of those surveyed, close to 60 percent were planning to deploy Native executables in the next two years.
Over the years, our colleagues at BellSoft have supported our JDK development efforts by providing the Liberica JDK. Now, VMware Tanzu customers using Liberica Native Image Kit (NIK) to create native images of Spring Boot applications are fully supported. Liberica NIK supports a wide variety of platforms (including different versions of Linux, Alpine Linux, Windows, and MacOS), and runs with most JDK versions. Spring Native versions 0.10 and later work with these NIK releases, as well as continuing to work with GraalVM releases, too. We know that many Spring developers consume Spring Native via buildpacks, and we plan to update the Native Image Buildpack to use the supported NIK release.
In 2021, we have continued to work towards our goal of enabling developers to compile Spring Boot applications into native executables with as few changes as possible. This has involved work across the Spring portfolio, and in close alignment with the GraalVM team on various improvements—including a brand new native testing capability. Come and learn about all this work in our talk at SpringOne. We look forward to the Spring community’s continued adoption of Spring Native!
About VMware:
VMware software powers the world’s complex digital infrastructure. The company’s cloud, networking and security, and digital workspace offerings provide a dynamic and efficient digital foundation to customers globally, aided by an extensive ecosystem of partners. Headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., VMware is committed to being a force for good, from its breakthrough innovations to its global impact.
For more information, please visit www.vmware.com/company.html
About BellSoft:
BellSoft, a leading OpenJDK contributor, provides security, progressive Java Runtime, and Liberica JDK for cloud and present-day architectures, and modern tools for Java applications. BellSoft engineers have been contributing to the OpenJDK project since its inception. The company drives a community-powered approach to deliver reliable and compact containers with Liberica JDK targets and microservice solutions. Using popular as well as in-house performance optimization techniques and tools allows BellSoft to work on performance tuning for industry leaders.
You can find more BellSoft news on the companies’ blog.
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