Evaluate Spring Modulith actuators

[odrotbohm]

Spring Modulith exposes actuators that describe the logical application modules defined in a Spring Boot application. Those modules declare a base package within which all its components reside.

It would be nice if the actuator integration in STS made use of that information to augment the views it provides in supported IDEs to group the listed information by application module. Here are some ideas:

• The beans view in STS could group the bean nodes by module (fully-qualified bean class name starts with the application module's base package)
• The same for request mappings for controllers found
• The "General" tab (Eclipse) could list the modules detected, and a click could jump to its base package

The JSON structure exposed by the actuator is described in the corresponding section of the reference documentation. An example application is available in Spring Modulith's repository. It's spring-modulith-example that can be imported in any IDE, started with ./mvnw spring-boot:run and exposes two modules order and inventory at http://localhost:8080/actuator/applicationmodules.

Please let me know if there's anything else you'd like to know, or I could help with.

[martinlippert]

Thanks @odrotbohm for filling this enhancement request, would be awesome to support the spring-modulith module structure and the new architecture in the various visualizations for Spring elements that we have in the IDEs. And I think it would be great to not only have this being used in the STS UI, but also VSCode.

Using the actuator information here - as you describes - focuses this on the live information that the IDE grabs from a running Spring application. What do you think about having information at hand without running the app as well? (just as an additional thought)

[odrotbohm]

You're right. The arrangement isn't likely to change much at runtime, and we could also create this JSON structure statically. IIRC we discussed something like this at some point, and you suggested a simple class with a main(…) method accepting a Java package name as argument. What way would you like to consume the JSON then? A file written? The JSON written to stdout?

[odrotbohm]

The fix for spring-projects/spring-modulith#119 contains a class org.springframework.modulith.core.util.ApplicationModuleExporter that exposes a main method working as described above: takes a Java package name and writes the JSON to standard out. If you rather prefer a file, please let me know. Code is available via the 0.3 snapshots.