We are happy to announce that Spincast now has a plugin to generate OpenAPI / Swagger specifications! This allows you to document a REST API developed using Spincast easily.

The plugin, Spincast OpenAPI Bottom Up, uses a bottom-up approach (also called "code first" approach) as it starts from the code of your application to generate the associated OpenAPI specifications as JSON or as YAML.

This plugin reuses a lot of code from the battle-tested and well-maintained official Swagger Core reference implementation. Doing so, the plugin should respect the OpenAPI specifications very well and should also be future-proof.

A new plugin, Spincast Logback Utils is now available. This small plugin allows you to easily configure Logback, for logging purposes in your application.

Using plain Java code, you can specify which configuration file Logback should be configured with, for example depending on the environment the application runs on! The plugin also allows you to tweak the content of the configuration file, for example by replacing some placeholders.

The very first Git commit of Spincast framework was done April 23, 2016, almost three years ago! Since then, Spincast has always stayed in beta... Why is that? The answer is that we wanted to stabilize the API as much as possible and we wanted Spincast to be used on real projects before calling it ready.

Since then, a lot of new plugins have been developed. A RealWorld.io implementation (here) was also created... RealWorld.io is slowly becoming a mandatory rite of passage for any new framework.

Big Bada Boom comics is an example of a real project entirely based on Spincast. Everything, from authentication to security is based on Spincast framework.

At first, we wanted to migrate Spincast to Java 11 before tagging it 1.0.0, but sadly we feel the Java ecosystem is still not perfect in regard to the new JPMS/Jigsaw module system added in Java 9... We encountered many errors using the popular IDEs trying to migrate. So we decided to stabilize on Java 8 first. Spincast 2.X.X will be based on Java 11 when we feel the tools are mature enough.

Please play with the Quick Start application! Tell us what you think. Feel free to contribute. We know we do not have the financial resources or a community as big as other frameworks such as Spring, but look at the code, experiment a bit, make your own mind.

A new feature and a new plugin are now available and they work together very well!

The new feature is Hotlinking Protection. This feature allows you to protect resources from your website that may have been embedded in a foreign website, without your consent. You can then simply stop serving those hotlinked resources (a forbidden status is returned), or you can decide to serve different versions of them...

And this is where the new plugin becomes handy: the Spincast Watermark Plugin. This plugin allows you to watermark files, images in particular. For example, you could use this plugin to create an image identical to a base image but with your logo added at one of its corners.

Hotlinking protection and watermarking go very well together, as you can now easily serve a watermarked version of your images if they are hotlinked without your consent.

A new plugin, Spincast Flyway Utils, integrates Flyway into Spincast to provide easy migrations for your SQL database.

By using this plugin, you write your migrations using plain Java code, will full dependency injection support. You are also sure the appropriate connection will be used when running the SQL queries, even when your code makes use of existing components that are not aware of the migration context.