Should I create a new spring-boot starter or use optional dependencies?

Question

I'm currently maintaining a fork of the jodconverter project which offers a spring-boot-starter module, allowing a spring-boot based app to use an Open/Libre Office installation (on the same server) to automate document conversions.

Now, the project have grown and a new module was born, named jodconverter-online. This module will send conversion request to a LibreOffice Online server, and I now want to create a spring-boot starter to support this new module.

The current jodconverter-local (on which depends the current jodconverter-spring-boot-starter) does not have the same dependencies as the jodconverter-online module. This is why they are two separated modules in the first place.

So my question is:

Should I create a new jodconverter-online-spring-boot-starter or if it is possible (and how) to just modify the current starter project, making the dependencies optional according to the needs of the user.

For now I put it all in the current starter project (which is available as a 4.2.0-SNAPSHOT in the OSS snapshot repository), but I'm doing it the wrong way since it automatically adds the dependencies for both the jodconverter-local and the jodconverter-online modules.

Answer 1

You may want to make the dependencies to jodconverter-local and jodconverter-online optional, you just need to replace the keyword compile by compileOnly in your Gradle build file.

Obviously, when dependencies become optional, the developer will have to choose one of the options and add it to their project's dependencies (in addition to your starter).

If the only additional dependency is either jodconverter-local or jodconverter-online, that is no big deal. But if more dependencies have to be added for each case, then you might consider creating a new starter to encapsulate those dependencies.

As for the AutoConfigurations, I don't see any problem with what you did, since you use @ConditionalOnClass to trigger the AutoConfiguration only when the corresponding class is present on the classpath.