Where are spring tutorials without spring-boot? [closed]

Question

All the tutorials on spring.io are now all spring-boot centric. I'm not interested in converting existing projects to boot, and am not particularly interested in using boot for new projects, the "Takes an opinionated view of building Spring applications..." project statement isn't particularly encouraging.

Given this, I'm wondering where all the tutorials are for using spring without boot. Sure, the docs are great but those old tutorials were great.

Answer 1

One can never please everyone.

When adding plain Spring samples people will start asking question why DataSources don't work or their activemq setup doesn't work (people usually don't takes days to figure it out, if it doesn't work < 5m a guide/project/sample is crap even if the error is their own).

The same for XML and JavaConfig for years the argument was that Spring == XML Hell (just take a look at their samples was often overheard/-read) now that is Java based config (a road that even Java EE is taking) it isn't ok either.

The Spring Boot guides allow you to focus on the core content at hand, instead of all the necessities/complexities around them. Nonetheless I do agree that some basic plain Spring Framework guides should exist. You might wan to comment on this issue

Answer 2

Hopefully, with Google help, it is easy to find the excellent tutorials from mkyong. The reference manual (ok, not a tutorial) contains also a good deal of examples.

But you are right, it is easy to find javadoc and reference manuals for older Spring versions, but I could not find any tutorial on spring.io without spring-boot.

Edit (per m4rtin's comment) :

For a true beginner that would want to avoid spring-boot (want to deploy to a real container for example), they can be used alone. They can be used also as a way to skip the spring-boot part along with a more up to date tutorial from spring.io. I mean : spring-boot is just a way to automagically build a skeletal application including application contextes, and it is used for that in recent tutorials. But you can always create the skeletal application without spring-boot (with the use of the older mkyong tutorials) and then add the other components to follow a newer tutorial. Of course, it is a more advanced use, but it is the way I did for recently try some parts of Spring (other than the basic framework) because I am used to my old own tomcat and do not really like boot.

Of course if you only want to try something that you will throw away as soon as completed, the right way is probably to fully follow the new tutorials and use boot.