Springboot

Spring Boot is an open source Java-based framework used to create a micro Service. It is developed by Pivotal Team and is used to build stand-alone and production ready spring applications. This chapter will give you an introduction to Spring Boot and familiarizes you with its basic concepts.

What is Spring Boot?

Spring Boot provides a good platform for Java developers to develop a stand-alone and production-grade spring application that you can?just run. You can get started with minimum configurations without the need for an entire Spring configuration setup.

Advantages

Spring Boot offers the following advantages to its developers ?

• Easy to understand and develop spring applications
• Increases productivity
• Reduces the development time

Goals

Spring Boot is designed with the following goals ?

• To avoid complex XML configuration in Spring
• To develop a production ready Spring applications in an easier way
• To reduce the development time and run the application independently
• Offer an easier way of getting started with the application

Why Spring Boot?

You can choose Spring Boot because of the features and benefits it offers as given here ?

• It provides a flexible way to configure Java Beans, XML configurations, and Database Transactions.
• It provides a powerful batch processing and manages REST endpoints.
• In Spring Boot, everything is auto configured; no manual configurations are needed.
• It offers annotation-based spring application
• Eases dependency management
• It includes Embedded Servlet Container

How does it work?

Spring Boot automatically configures your application based on the dependencies you have added to the project by using?@EnableAutoConfiguration?annotation. For example, if MySQL database is on your classpath, but you have not configured any database connection, then Spring Boot auto-configures an in-memory database.

The entry point of the spring boot application is the class contains?@SpringBootApplication?annotation and the main method.

Spring Boot automatically scans all the components included in the project by using?@ComponentScan?annotation.

Spring Boot Starters

Handling dependency management is a difficult task for big projects. Spring Boot resolves this problem by providing a set of dependencies for developers convenience.

For example, if you want to use Spring and JPA for database access, it is sufficient if you include?spring-boot-starter-data-jpa?dependency in your project.

Note that all Spring Boot starters follow the same naming pattern?spring-boot-starter-?*, where * indicates that it is a type of the application.