8. Functional Bean Definitions

Here’s a vanilla Spring Cloud Function application from with the familiar @Configuration and @Bean declaration style:

@SpringBootApplication
public class DemoApplication {

  @Bean
  public Function<String, String> uppercase() {
    return value -> value.toUpperCase();
  }

  public static void main(String[] args) {
    SpringApplication.run(DemoApplication.class, args);
  }

}

You can run the above in a serverless platform, like AWS Lambda or Azure Functions, or you can run it in its own HTTP server just by including spring-cloud-function-starter-web on the classpath. Running the main method would expose an endpoint that you can use to ping that uppercase function:

$ curl localhost:8080 -d foo
FOO

The web adapter in spring-cloud-function-starter-web uses Spring MVC, so you needed a Servlet container. You can also use Webflux where the default server is netty (even though you can still use Servlet containers if you want to) - just include the spring-cloud-starter-function-webflux dependency instead. The functionality is the same, and the user application code can be used in both.

Now for the functional beans: the user application code can be recast into "functional" form, like this:

@SpringBootConfiguration
public class DemoApplication implements ApplicationContextInitializer<GenericApplicationContext> {

  public static void main(String[] args) {
    FunctionalSpringApplication.run(DemoApplication.class, args);
  }

  public Function<String, String> uppercase() {
    return value -> value.toUpperCase();
  }

  @Override
  public void initialize(GenericApplicationContext context) {
    context.registerBean("demo", FunctionRegistration.class,
        () -> new FunctionRegistration<>(uppercase())
            .type(FunctionType.from(String.class).to(String.class)));
  }

}

The main differences are:

The business logic beans that you register in a Spring Cloud Function app are of type FunctionRegistration. This is a wrapper that contains both the function and information about the input and output types. In the @Bean form of the application that information can be derived reflectively, but in a functional bean registration some of it is lost unless we use a FunctionRegistration.

An alternative to using an ApplicationContextInitializer and FunctionRegistration is to make the application itself implement Function (or Consumer or Supplier). Example (equivalent to the above):

@SpringBootConfiguration
public class DemoApplication implements Function<String, String> {

  public static void main(String[] args) {
    FunctionalSpringApplication.run(DemoApplication.class, args);
  }

  @Override
  public String uppercase(String value) {
    return value.toUpperCase();
  }

}

It would also work if you add a separate, standalone class of type Function and register it with the SpringApplication using an alternative form of the run() method. The main thing is that the generic type information is available at runtime through the class declaration.

The app runs in its own HTTP server if you add spring-cloud-starter-function-webflux (it won’t work with the MVC starter at the moment because the functional form of the embedded Servlet container hasn’t been implemented). The app also runs just fine in AWS Lambda or Azure Functions, and the improvements in startup time are dramatic.

	Note
	The "lite" web server has some limitations for the range of Function signatures - in particular it doesn’t (yet) support Message input and output, but POJOs and any kind of Publisher should be fine.

Spring Cloud Function also has some utilities for integration testing that will be very familiar to Spring Boot users. For example, here is an integration test for the HTTP server wrapping the app above:

@RunWith(SpringRunner.class)
@FunctionalSpringBootTest
@AutoConfigureWebTestClient
public class FunctionalTests {

	@Autowired
	private WebTestClient client;

	@Test
	public void words() throws Exception {
		client.post().uri("/").body(Mono.just("foo"), String.class).exchange()
				.expectStatus().isOk().expectBody(String.class).isEqualTo("FOO");
	}

}

This test is almost identical to the one you would write for the @Bean version of the same app - the only difference is the @FunctionalSpringBootTest annotation, instead of the regular @SpringBootTest. All the other pieces, like the @Autowired WebTestClient, are standard Spring Boot features.

Or you could write a test for a non-HTTP app using just the FunctionCatalog. For example:

@RunWith(SpringRunner.class)
@FunctionalSpringBootTest
public class FunctionalTests {

	@Autowired
	private FunctionCatalog catalog;

	@Test
	public void words() throws Exception {
		Function<Flux<String>, Flux<String>> function = catalog.lookup(Function.class,
				"function");
		assertThat(function.apply(Flux.just("foo")).blockFirst()).isEqualTo("FOO");
	}

}

(The FunctionCatalog always returns functions from Flux to Flux, even if the user declares them with a simpler signature.)

Most Spring Cloud Function apps have a relatively small scope compared to the whole of Spring Boot, so we are able to adapt it to these functional bean definitions easily. If you step outside that limited scope, you can extend your Spring Cloud Function app by switching back to @Bean style configuration, or by using a hybrid approach. If you want to take advantage of Spring Boot autoconfiguration for integrations with external datastores, for example, you will need to use @EnableAutoConfiguration. Your functions can still be defined using the functional declarations if you want (i.e. the "hybrid" style), but in that case you will need to explicitly switch off the "full functional mode" using spring.functional.enabled=false so that Spring Boot can take back control.