Document how third parties should identify their starters

[snicoll]

Third parties are creating their own starters and it seems that spring-boot-starter is a natural prefix for them. Both activitii and camel have such starters.

Wouldn't it be a good idea for us to "formally" document some aspects of a 3rd party starter? For one, using a different prefix would be a good idea IMO. We could avoid ending up in a situation where we have two spring-boot-starter-actuator now.

ping @jbarrez & @hekonsek

Here is what I suggest for what would be wrongly called spring-boot-starter-xyz:

• If xyz is small enough so that only one starter makes sense, name it xyz-spring-boot-starter. After all, all your modules probably start with xyz already anyway
• If you have more that one potential starters, just extend the prefix: xyz-first-spring-boot-starter - xyz-second-spring-boot-starter.

[dsyer]

Are you suggesting we just stick it in the user guide somewhere and hope people read it? I guess there's not much else we can do. As far as naming recommendations go, I guess I would expect anything that started with "spring-boot-starter" to be a problem, but not necessarily anything else. I would expect that the author of library x would want to use "x-starter-" or "x-spring-boot-starter-". Any other suggestions?

[hekonsek]

Hi guys,

I named our Camel starter camel-spring-boot to follow our Camel component naming convention. However if you create a section in the documentation suggesting that starter for 3rd party project foo should be named for example spring-boot-starter-foo, then I will change the name of our artifact. A little section in the documentation should be fine :) .

Cheers.

[dsyer]

@hekonsek thanks for the update. Actually what I said was we prefer it the way you have it already (if I read yours correctly), i.e. it definitely should not be named spring-boot-starter-foo.

@jbarrez can yours be renamed, please?

[hekonsek]

OK. I'll leave camel-spring-boot then. And having a section in documentation explaining the convention would be a nice thing :) .

[dsyer]

In Spring Boot there is a difference between "spring-boot-x" and "spring-boot-starter-x" (the starter has no code by convention). I think that might change in 1.3, but we haven't had that discussion yet. Meanwhile, I expect that "camel-spring-boot" probably contains code and has curated dependencies, so I think the name looks consistent with our usage. Other people might have other opinions I guess.

[snicoll]

anything with projectName-spring-boot is fine by me. Honestly the fact that the underlying dependency has code or not is irrelevant IMO. A suffix is only needed if you expect more than one kind so I think camel-spring-boot is just fine.

[jbarrez]

I don't see any issue renaming the one in Activiti to activiti-spring-boot-starter-x (see https://github.com/Activiti/Activiti/tree/master/modules/activiti-spring-boot/spring-boot-starters for all our starters). It's a maven pom.xml change and a doc changes on our side.

@joshlong : Do you agree? Or was there a particular reason why we've named it like this?

[dsyer]

Probably copy-paste error (if I know the way @joshlong works) ;-).

[philwebb]

I don't really have an opinion on what other projects use but I think we should add a note saying that we prefer to keep spring-boot-starter-* for us.

[wilkinsona]

/cc @joshiste

[joshiste]

/cc @denschu @tobiasflohre

[denschu]

How should we name this starter? -> https://github.com/codecentric/spring-boot-starter-batch-web
There is a lot of code in it :-), but it's not an official starter...