Grupo Alarcos · Journal article · 2021

Investigating the impact on execution time and energy consumption of developing with Spring

Coral Calero Muñoz, Macario Polo Usaola, María Ángeles Moraga de la Rubia

Sustainable Computing Informatics and Systems · 2021 · 18 citations (OpenAlex) · Q1

Respect for the environment has become a feature of life that is essential to take into account in our present-day society. Nevertheless, although software consumes large amounts of energy, in the software development sector it seems that awareness of this issue is still lacking. As software engineers, we must contribute to bringing about a change of vision in the sector. A good way of doing so is by giving companies clear guidelines on how to act. In this paper we present an example of this, focused on Spring. Spring is a server-side Java development framework that reduces the time to market of new applications, helps developers to save a great deal of development time, and hence improves their productivity. Our objective is to discover whether all these advantages are also accompanied by good energy consumption behaviour. To that end, we have compared the execution time and the energy consumption required by three releases of the same application, developed with and without Spring. This paper presents all the details of the study carried out, and sets forth our conclusions on the suitability of using Spring in the development of software applications.