We're a Spring Boot shop and rely heavily on Spring MVC for our REST endpoints. We use Boot and embedded Tomcat to create a self-hosting JAR. Is it possible to replace Tomcat with Ratback while still keeping all my Spring MVC code in place? I am afraid that Spring MVC is tied into the servlet specification somehow and will not run without a servlet container. I am aware of dsyer/spring-boot-ratpack work but after skimming the code couldn't decide if Spring MVC would play well using the bridge. Is anyone aware of any work that will allow us to retain our investment in Spring MVC and have Spring Boot use Ratpack to manage HTTP traffic?
The Spring MVC programming model is not very heavily dependent on Servlet APIs, but it's not supported in any other containers (i.e. not in Ratpack). There is some async stuff there now and Servlet 3.1 enhances it some more, so if that's the part of Ratpack that attracts you, maybe just using that would be a better approach. You won't get all the way to reactive and non-blocking IO that way though.