Spring Boot 2.1 introduced log groups. A log group is a logical name for one or more loggers. We can define log groups in our application configuration. Then we can set the log level for a group, so all loggers in the group will get the same log level. This can be very useful to change a log level for multiple loggers that belong together with one setting. Spring Boot already provides two log groups by default: web and sql. In the following list we see which loggers are part of the default log groups:

To get an overview of all Gradle tasks in our project we need to run the tasks task. Since Gradle 5.1 we can use the --group option followed by a group name. Gradle will then show all tasks belonging to the group and not the other tasks in the project.

Suppose we have a Gradle Java project and want to show the tasks that belong to the build group:

In a previous post we learned how to include parts of a document in the generated output. The included parts are defined using tags. The start of a tag is defined in a comment with the format tag::_tagName_[] and the end has the format end::_tagName_[]. Next we must use the tags attribute for the include macro followed by the tagName. If we don’t want to include a tag we must prefix it with an exclamation mark (!).

Since Java 9 we can specify that the Javadoc output must be generated in HTML 5 instead of the default HTML 4. We need to pass the option -html5 to the javadoc tool. To do this in Gradle we must add the option to the javadoc task configuration. We use the addBooleanOption method of the options property that is part of the javadoc task. We set the argument to html5 and the value to true.

In the following example we reconfigure the javadoc task to make sure the generated Javadoc output is in HTML 5:

One of the most important features in Gradle is the support for incremental tasks. Incremental tasks have input and output properties that can be checked by Gradle. When the values of the properties haven’t changed then the task can be marked as up to date by Gradle and it is not executed. This makes a build much faster. Input and output properties can be files, directories or plain object values. We can set a task input property with a date or date/time value to define when a task is up to date for a specific period. As long as the value of the input property hasn’t changed (and of course also the other input and output property values) Gradle will not rerun task and mark it as up to date. This is useful for example if a long running task (e.g. large integration test suite) only needs to run once a day or another period.

In the following example Gradle build file we define a new task Broadcast that will get content from a remote URL and save it in a file. In our case we want to save the latest messages from SDKMAN!. If you don’t know SKDMAN! you should check it out!. The Broadcast task has an incremental task output property, which is the output file of the task:

In Micronaut we can inject configuration properties in different ways into our beans. We can use for example the @Value annotation using a string value with a placeholder for the configuration property name. If we don’t want to use a placeholder we can also use the @Property annotation and set the name attribute to the configuration property name. We have to pay attention to the format of the configuration property name we use. If we refer to a configuration property name using @Value or @Property we must use lowercased and hyphen separated names (also known as kebab casing). Even if the name of the configuration property is camel cased in the configuration file. For example if we have a configuration property sample.theAnswer in our application.properties file, we must use the name sample.the-answer to get the value.

In the following Spock specification we see how to use it in code. The specification defines two beans that use the @Value and @Property annotations and we see that we need to use kebab casing for the configuration property names, even though we use camel casing to set the configuration property values:

Normally we would consume server-sent events (SSE) in a web browser, but we can also consume them in our code on the server. Micronaut has a low-level HTTP client with a SseClient interface that we can use to get server-sent events. The interface has an eventStream method with different arguments that return a Publisher type of the Reactive Streams API. We can use the RxSseClient interface to get back RxJava2 Flowable return type instead of Publisher type. We can also use Micronaut’s declarative HTTP client, which we define using the @Client annotation, that supports server-sent events with the correct annotation attributes.

In our example we first create a controller in Micronaut to send out server-sent events. We must create method that returns a Publisher type with Event objects. These Event objects can contains some attributes like id and name, but also the actual object we want to send:

We can add Micronaut beans to the application context of a Spring application. Micronaut has a MicronautBeanProcessor class that we need to register as Spring bean in the Spring application context. We can define which Micronaut bean types need to be added to the Spring application context via the constructor of the MicronautBeanProcessor class. This way we can use Micronaut from inside a Spring application. For example we can use the declarative HTTP client of Micronaut in our Spring applications.

First we need to add dependencies on Micronaut to our Spring application. In this example we will use the Micronaut HTTP client in our Spring application and use Gradle as build tool. We must add the following dependencies:

When our Micronaut application starts we can listen for the ServiceStartedEvent event and write code that needs to run when the event is fired. We can write a bean that implements the ApplicationEventListener interface with the type ServiceStartedEvent. Or we can use the @EventListener annotation on our method with code we want to run on startup. If the execution of the code can take a while we can also add the @Async annotation to the method, so Micronaut can execute the code on a separate thread.

In our example application we have a reactive repository for a Mongo database and we want to save some data in the database when our Micronaut application starts. First we write a bean that implements the ApplicationEventListener:

Jib is an open-source Java library from Google for creating Docker images for Java applications. Jib can be used as Maven or Gradle plugin in our Spring Boot project. One of the nice feature of Jib is that it adds layers with our classes, resources and dependency libraries for the Docker image. This means that when only class files have changed, the classes layer is rebuild, but the others remain the same. Therefore the creation of a Docker image with our Spring Boot application is also very fast (after the first creation). Also the Maven and Gradle plugins have sensible defaults, like using the project name and version as image name, so we don’t have to configure anything in our build tool. Although Jib provides options to configure other values for the defaults, for example to change the JVM options passed on to the application.

Let’s see Jib in action for a simple Spring Boot application. In our example we use Gradle as build tool with the following Spring Boot application:

Document attributes in Asciidoctor are very powerful. We can assign values to a document attributes and reference the attribute name in our document enclosed between curly braces. Asciidoctor will fill in the value when the document is transformed. Instead of a plain value we can also use styling markup in the document attribute definition. We must use the passthrough macro and allow for quote substitution.

In the following example document we define three document attributes: cl-added, cl-updated and cl-changed. We use the passthrough macro, quotes substation to assign CSS classes:

When we use the Micronaut command line commands to generate controllers, beans and more, the classes will have a default package name. We can use a fully qualified package name for the class we want to generate, but when we only define a class name, Micronaut will use a default package name automatically. We can set the default package for an application when we first create an application with the create-app command. But we can also alter the default package name for an existing Micronaut application.

To set the default package name when we create a new application we must include the package name in our application name. For example when we want to use the default package name mrhaki.micronaut for an application that is called book-service we must use the following create-app command: