Support for the Spring Boot thin jar layout

[plaird]

Spring Boot has an experimental thin layout.A thin Spring Boot jar does not contain the dependencies internally like in the fat jar. The thin loader reads a descriptor (pom.xml or thin.properties) that then triggers the loader to download those dependencies at first launch of the service.

Spring Boot Thin Jar

I am not wild about it because it runs contrary to the idea of the Bazel principle of producing a hermetic output. I see the value though - if you distribute your app widely, it reduces the size of the binary that you push to your users. If those users already have your deps in their .m2/repository, they won't have to incur the cost of downloading the fat jar with all of them.

[plaird]

A recent article about this is here:
https://www.baeldung.com/spring-boot-thin-jar

But it is still marked experimental and appears to have stopped with Boot2.
https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/springframework/boot/experimental/spring-boot-thin-layout/1.0.31.RELEASE/spring-boot-thin-layout-1.0.31.RELEASE.pom

I will leave open, but I don't plan to work on this since it seems dead.