Spring Boot 2.0 has finally arrived. Unfortunately we aren’t yet in a position at the office to be able to begin the upgrade so I decided to start playing around with it on one of my projects at home as I didn’t want to wait until we were ready to update our app.

The first thing I noticed about it they removed findOne() from CrudRepository. This to me is a bad change for all the users of the framework. It is one of the most commonly used methods in Spring Data, and not people either have to refactor their code to use findById() which returns an Optional<> of the type and deal with the optional instead of a null or you have to add a findOne with an @Query to all of your repositories. I have worked on projects in the past that have hundreds of tables and Repositories. This change is forcing them to update hundreds of classes just to upgrade to Spring Boot 2.0. It seems to me a better choice would have been to @Deprecated on findOne and encourage people to upgrade to the new findById method.

The next breaking change I found was also in Spring Data. They removed the delete() method from CrudRepository that takes an ID as the type. It has been replaced by a deleteById() call. There is no good reason for this change. In Java we have method overloading so the language can determine whether to invoke delete() with the Entity or delete() with an ID. It seems like they were trying to be consistent with findById() but they just end up breaking a bunch of code in the process. The only benefit that I can see with this change is groovy will get happier as it seems to be very poor at understand overloaded methods.

The next change I noticed was when calling new PageRequest(page, size) it was telling me that constructor was deprecated. To me this is the right way to handle the situation. I clicked into the method and it suggested to use PageRequest.of() instead. That was an easy fix that I made and seems more consistent with Effective Java about using static factory methods instead of constructors.

Finally I got all my unit tests updated to replace the findOne calls with the findById changes I had made and I went to launch the application and Hibernate fell over. It looks like the new version of Hibernate requires me to specify a GenerationType of Identity with MySQL where before it didn’t force me to specify it.

All in all it wasn’t too bad to upgrade my toy application. I am really looking forward to using Spring Boot 2.0 going forward, but a little disappointed by some of the Spring Data breaking changes. I feel like this could have been transitioned in to make it easier to upgrade existing Spring Boot 1.5.x applications. It is interesting that 2.0 is the first release to support running under Java 9, and it is finally released a month before Java 9 goes away and Java 10 is released. Up next for my test application will be switching it to Java 9 to see if I see any issues with that.