Microsoft announced Spring Boot improvements in the latest update to Java on Visual Studio Code tooling.

That tooling comes in the Spring Boot Extension Pack in the Visual Studio Code Marketplace, which has been installed more than 1 million times. Published by Pivotal, it provides:

Spring Boot streamlines and speeds up web app and microservices development within Spring, an open source Java framework that fosters Java app development in a streamlined, modular approach.

In the regular monthly (June 2022) update to Java on Visual Studio Code, the dev team announced enhanced Spring Boot functionality as part of a major "Spring Boot End-to-end Improvement" push announced in a 2022 roadmap post (the team also handles the preview Extension Pack for Java with more than 13.5 million installs).

At the time, the dev team announced it would work with VMware (which acquired Pivotal in 2019) to improve both core Java extensions and Spring extensions in these areas:

The dev team last week announced improvements to the Spring Boot dashboard, mentioned in the fourth item in the above list. The dashboard has its own individual extension that's part of the Spring Boot Extension Pack mentioned above. The Spring Boot Dashboard extension provides an explorer in the side bar where developers can view all of a workspace's Spring Boot projects in one place, from which they can also quickly start, stop or debug projects.

"Microsoft has been working with VMWare to polish out the experience on the visualization for Spring Boot dashboard," said Nick Zhu, senior program manager. "In the past, the dashboard has been mainly used to launch apps. However, we realized that was far from enough. As a Spring developer, we often deal with beans and REST API mappings. As a result, we decided to bring these two concepts into the the Spring Boot dashboard extension and brought the extension into a separate view."

Besides getting a clear overview of all the beans (special Java classes) and API mappings in a current Spring application, developers now also enjoy features such as:

Along with the focus on the Spring Boot dashboard, the team announced many other improvements, which are described under these headings:

"Great to see these enhancements!" said one developer in the comments section of the announcement post. "Keep going! Especially love the remote container debugging features ... Game changer?"

David Ramel is an editor and writer for Converge360.

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Dev team improves functionality of Spring Boot dashboard, gives it separate view.

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