Damien Vitrac

Introducing the new feature on start.spring.io: Explore the project.
With this, you can now take a peek at the generated project files without having to actually download it, unzip it, etc.

A lot of developers requested this feature, because they’d like to compare with another project, or upgrade an existing application. We’d like to explore those possibilities more in the future, so send your feedback our way!

Explore the project:

• Depending on the project, the pom.xml / build.gradle / build.gradle.kts will be shown by default
• Highlighting code (1), preview markdown
• Copy and download a file

We are happy to announce today that start.spring.io is now built using React/Gatsby as the front-end framework. We also made UI improvements based on your feedback. Thank you to all those who have contributed to this update and to all the users who continue to tell us how to improve!

React.js

During the previous Web UI modernization (launched on March 5th), we realized that making even small changes to the site had become more time consuming than we anticipated. The architecture was inhibiting our ability to run experiments and move quickly to make small, incremental changes.

On behalf of the team and everyone who has contributed, I’m happy to announce that Spring Initializr has been updated and is now available on start.spring.io.

UI changes - listening to your feedback

Following the last revision, the main feedback we received was about the missing list of dependencies. Some community members seemed to be looking at this list for information purposes (not necessarily using the website to generate a new app), while others would just like to see what’s available.

While start.spring.io seems like a very simple service, generating applications with a simple HTML form, there’s much more to it - this round of feedback taught us that we need to double-down on product discovery and user centered design.

On behalf of the team and everyone who has contributed, I’m happy to announce that Spring Initializr has been updated and is now available on start.spring.io.

A short history of Spring Initializr

The project started out as a minimal HTML form, letting you generate a Spring Boot application with a few options. It’s been well received by the Spring community, so the team added new ways to interact with it, through the command-line or your favorite IDE.

After a while, we decided to work on a first revision of the UI. We simplified the form, leaving the essential parts front and center and pushing others in a section hidden by default. Given the number of dependencies, we created a search box to look for available starters.