Everything You Must Know About Spring Boot Application From The Scratch

With the new innovations in the technological world, the Java platform has introduced a Spring framework that is a popular application framework and inversion of control container. You must be thinking what this framework is actually all about and what it offers, right? Besides these, you must be having a number of queries regarding the Spring Boot- which is recognized as the first milestone release of the Spring framework. So, let us move further and have a step-by-step overview regarding the Spring framework and Spring Boot applications:

What is Spring framework?

The Spring Framework, as discussed earlier, is an application framework and the inversion of the control container as well for the Java platform. Being an open source framework, the main features of Spring framework is not to impose any specific programming model and instead it is being viewed as a replacement or alternative or even addition to the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) model. The Spring Boot is considered as a completely new project from the Pivotal Team and is a framework developed on the top of existing framework.

What is Spring Boot application?

The Spring Boot is primarily considered as a framework from “The Spring Team” that eases the bootstrapping and the development of new Spring applications. It has not been implemented from the scratch by The Spring Team, instead, it has been implemented on the top of existing Spring Framework.

Being a Spring’s convention-over-configuration solution, the Spring Boot application helps in creating stand-alone, production-grade Spring-based applications that one can “just run”. It simplifies the process for configuring as well as deploying the spring applications.

• Initially, the Spring IO platform has been criticized for having bulky XML configuration with the complex dependency management, which now has been eliminated. With the help of Spring Boot, one can embrace an XML-free development experience while accessing files directly.
• The Spring Boot results into building production-ready Spring applications with feasible convention over configuration mechanism that allows to pre-configure the applications in a more opinionated way.

As a result, creating new Spring application becomes easier just as opening it in your browser and entering the metadata for the project (including Maven/Gradle attributes, version, language and much more). Further, you can select the dependencies according to the project needs and finally you can click on “Generate Project”.

A glance at fundamental goals of Spring Boot application:

Some of the most common primary goals of Spring Boot application are-

• Offering the impeccably faster as well as widely accessible ‘Getting Started’ experience for the majority of the Spring development.
• Providing a range of non-functional features that are common for large classes of projects.
• Getting opinionated out of the box while getting out of the way quickly as the requirements start to deviate from the default values.

Below we have presented a simple “Welcome to spring boot demo example” code snippet for your reference:

The following code with a command line tool can be used to prototype with Spring. If you are a Java developer, you can use start.spring.io for generating basic project. A simple “Welcome to spring boot demo example” code snippet is being described below:

DemoController.java import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication; import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.EnableAutoConfiguration; import org.springframework.stereotype.Controller; import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping; import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.ResponseBody; @Controller @EnableAutoConfiguration public class DemoController { @RequestMapping(“/”) @ResponseBody String home() { return “Welcome to spring boot demo example”; } public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { SpringApplication.run(DemoController.class, args); } }

Benefits of Spring Boot:

The Spring Boot can result into number of benefits that can be listed as follows:

• It makes it easier to develop Spring-based applications with Java or Groovy. Also, it reduces Developer’s effort with the “Opinionated Defaults Configuration” approach.
• It minimizes writing multiple boilerplate codes, XML configuration and annotation, ultimately enhancing productivity while reducing lots of development time.
• It makes it easier to integrate the Spring Boot Application with the Spring Ecosystem that majorly includes Spring ORM, Spring JDBC, Spring Security, Spring Data and many other things.
• It tests the web applications easily with the help of different Embedded HTTP servers that includes Tomcat, Jetty and many others.
• It offers Command Line Interface (CLI) tool for developing and testing Spring Boot.
• It offers a number of plugins for developing and testing Spring Boot Applications easily using Maven/Gradle- the build tools.
• It offers a number of plugins for working with embedded and in-memory databases easily.

Well, till now you have got enough information about what Spring Boot application is and what are its benefits. You must be thinking whether to opt for this Java application development for your project or not, right?? So, in order to eliminate such confusions, below we have listed some of the compelling reasons for you to look forward and implement Spring Boot in your project. Let’s have a look at those compelling reasons:

Final Wrap Up:

At present, the Spring Boot framework is drastically changing the Spring-Java Based Applications Programming model into the new programming model. We could expect more development and advancements in this technology in the near future as well.

In addition to that, with the above post, we could conclude that- Spring Boot = Existing Spring Framework + Embedded HTTP Servers – XML or Annotations.