In this article, you will learn how to build a GraalVM image for your Spring Boot application. Following these practical steps, you will be able to apply them to your own Spring Boot application. Enjoy!

Introduction

Java is a great programming language and is platform independent. Write once, run anywhere! But this comes at a cost. Java is portable because Java compiles your code to bytecode. Bytecode is computer object code, which an interpreter, (read: Virtual Machine), can interpret and convert to machine code. When you start your Java application, the Virtual Machine will convert the bytecode into bytecode specific for the platform, called native machine code. This is done by the just-in-time compiler (JIT). As you will understand, this conversion takes some time during startup.