Chapter 5. Getting Groovy with the Spring Boot CLI
This chapter covers
- Automatic dependencies and imports
- Grabbing dependencies
- Testing CLI-based applications
Some things go really well together. Peanut butter and jelly. Abbott and Costello. Thunder and lightning. Milk and cookies. On their own, these things are great. But when paired up, they’re even more awesome.
So far, we’ve seen a lot of great things that Spring Boot has to offer, including auto-configuration and starter dependencies. When paired up with the elegance of the Groovy language, the result can be greater than the sum of its parts.
In this chapter, we’re going to look at the Spring Boot CLI, a command-line tool that brings the power of Spring Boot and Groovy together to form a simple and compelling development tool for creating Spring applications. To demonstrate the power of Spring Boot’s CLI, we’re going to rewind the reading-list application from chapter 2, rewriting it from scratch in Groovy and taking advantage of the benefits that the CLI has to offer.
Most development projects that target the JVM platform are developed in the Java language and involve a build system such as Maven or Gradle to produce a deployable artifact. In fact, the reading-list application we created in chapter 2 follows this model.