What is Spring Boot actually about? (and what it is not)

What is Spring Boot actually about? Why is it so popular in Java development?

In this post, I’d like to share with you exactly what Spring Boot is, plus its key features and concepts. And what Spring Boot is not about.

1. What is Spring Boot?

You know, Spring Boot is a project of the Spring platform or Spring ecosystem. It is a way that aims at helping developers get started with Spring framework with minimum effort, easier and more convenient - as development with pure Spring framework is well known as boilerplate with lots of XML configuration and dependency mess.

Spring Boot makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring-based applications. So developers can save time and increase productivity by using Spring Boot.

2. Key Features of Spring Boot

Spring Boot offers some great features as described below:

• Create stand-alone Spring applications with embedded server (Tomcat, Jetty, or Undertow). So you don’t have to manually deploy WAR files. Just run your web app with embedded Tomcat server.
• Spring Boot provides Starter Dependencies that simplify dependency management of a Java project. No more dependency mess or dependency versions mismatch. All handled by starter dependencies, so you just name the ones you wish to use.
• Automatic configuration of Spring and 3^rd party libraries. This feature greatly speeds up project setup time for common libraries, e.g. Spring MVC, view resolver, Spring Security, Spring Data JPA, Thymeleaf template engine… So you can jump into developing business logics quickly.
• Furthermore, Spring Boot provides production-ready features such as metrics, health checks and externalized configuration - so developer could easily monitor their apps with ease.

Having said that, Spring Boot removes boilerplate code and XML configurations for common development scenarios - thus increase developer’s productivity - let them focus on business logics code instead of infrastructural code.

3. What Spring Boot is not about

Spring Boot is not a replacement of Spring framework. It’s based on Spring framework to provide a set of libraries and APIs that make Spring development much easier.

Spring Boot is not the only way to create Spring-based apps. You can develop Spring-based applications without Spring Boot, but more time consuming and painful.

That’s my share about what Spring Boot is actually about, its key features and what it is not. I hope you’re pretty clear now about Spring Boot.

To learn Spring Boot development with Java, I recommend you follow my Spring Boot tutorial series. And watch the following project demo to have better understand of Spring Boot:

Learn more: Understand Differences between Spring vs Spring Boot

Tutorials:

• Spring Framework Tutorials
• Spring Boot Tutorials
• Spring Security Tutorials

About the Author:

Nam Ha Minh is certified Java programmer (SCJP and SCWCD). He began programming with Java back in the days of Java 1.4 and has been passionate about it ever since. You can connect with him on Facebook and watch his Java videos on YouTube.