The Spring Pocket Guide: A short, hands-on reference guide to the Spring ecosystem for modern application development

Build production-ready, secure, AI-integrated web applications with the entire Spring ecosystem, and cloud-native deployment strategies.

Key Features

• Build production-ready Spring applications across HTTP, REST, GraphQL, and gRPC
• Secure distributed systems with OAuth 2, Spring Authorization Server, passkeys, and one-time tokens
• Integrate AI into real-world Spring applications using Spring AI, RAG, tool calling, and MCP

Book Description

The Spring Pocket Guide is a fast-paced, practical tour of modern Spring development, from your first project to production-ready, AI-integrated systems.

Starting with Spring Boot and Java 24+, you’ll build a complete microservice-style architecture around a fictional project. Along the way, you’ll explore HTTP endpoints, REST with HATEOAS, GraphQL schemas and resolvers, and high-performance gRPC services. You’ll integrate PostgreSQL (including vector support), consume external APIs with RestClient and declarative interface clients, and secure everything using Spring Security and OAuth 2.

But this isn’t just about traditional web services. You’ll go further, building an AI-powered assistant with Spring AI, implementing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), enabling tool calling, and exposing services through the emerging Model Context Protocol (MCP). The result is a modern, AI-ready Spring architecture built entirely on the “real web”, HTTP.

By the end of this guide, you’ll understand how to build secure, scalable, cloud-native, and AI-integrated systems using Spring’s latest capabilities.

What you will learn

• Set up modern Spring Boot projects with Java 24+, GraalVM, and Docker Compose
• Build web APIs using Spring MVC, REST, HATEOAS, GraphQL, and gRPC
• Consume external services using RestClient and declarative HTTP interface clients
• Secure applications with Spring Security, OAuth 2, Spring Authorization Server, passkeys, and one-time tokens
• Build AI-powered assistants using Spring AI and OpenAI integrations
• Apply retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with vector stores

Who this book is for

This book is for Java developers, Spring Boot engineers, and architects who want a practical, end-to-end understanding of modern Spring application development.

If you already know Java and want to confidently build secure, scalable web systems—and explore how AI integrates into real enterprise architectures—this guide will help you move from fundamentals to production-ready systems quickly.

It’s especially valuable for developers who want to stay ahead of the curve by combining traditional web architecture with emerging AI and interoperability standards like MCP.

Table of Contents

1. The Spring Pocket Guide