Shipping a Professional Blog with One Line of Java
Source: Dev.to
The Problem with the Status Quo
When you look online for Spring Boot blog solutions, you find two extremes. On one side, there are massive CMS platforms like Enonic that are overkill for a simple “thoughts” page. On the other, tutorials show how to use CommonMark to parse a file—leaving you to figure out the templates, CSS namespacing, RSS generation, and metadata yourself.
There was a missing middle: a “Vertical Slice” library that provides the whole feature, not just a parser.
From One Project to > 1 as Infra
The real test for devx-spring-blog came when I started new projects. I didn’t want to spend any time on a blog; I wanted to focus on core logic.
By pulling in the shared library, the integration looked like this:
- Add a
@Import(BlogConfiguration.class)to the main application. - Drop a few markdown files into
src/main/resources/content/blog/. - Set a
blog.titlein the properties.
In under five minutes, the project had a professional, SEO‑optimized blog at /blog with a live RSS feed and social‑sharing buttons. This proved that the extraction was more than a refactoring exercise—it was a force multiplier for subsequent projects.
Was it a Waste of Time?
In the short term, extracting code into a library can feel like a detour. It’s easier to “copy‑paste” and move on. However, looking at my git logs for another project, the difference is night and day. Moving from a scattered set of local controllers and templates to a single dependency cleaned up the codebase and made the marketing site much easier to maintain.
Is it a waste of time? Only if you never build another app. For a fleet of SaaS products, a portable blog engine is a superpower. It ensures a consistent look and feel across the entire ecosystem while keeping the focus on core product features.
Open Source and Ready to Use
devx-spring-blog is open‑source and free to use. It’s designed for developers who want the simplicity of a static site generator like Hugo or Jekyll, but within the comfort of their existing Spring Boot environment.
You get:
- Markdown‑powered content (no database required).
- Automatic RSS feeds at
/blog/rss.xml. - Built‑in SEO with Open Graph and JSON‑LD support.
- Namespaced CSS to prevent clashes with your main app styles.
If you’re building your second (or tenth) Spring project and dread the blog setup, give it a try. It’s about doing the work once so you never have to do it again.
Find the project on GitHub – devx-spring-blog.