What is spring boot

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 Micro Service?

Micro Service is an architecture that allows the developers to develop and deploy services independently. Each service running has its own process and this achieves the lightweight model to support business applications.

Advantages

Micro services offers the following advantages to its developers −

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 −

Goals

Spring Boot is designed with the following goals −

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.

Examples

Look at the following Spring Boot starters explained below for a better understanding −

Spring Boot Starter Actuator dependency is used to monitor and manage your application. Its code is shown below −

Spring Boot Starter Security dependency is used for Spring Security. Its code is shown below −

Spring Boot Starter web dependency is used to write a Rest Endpoints. Its code is shown below −

Spring Boot Starter Thyme Leaf dependency is used to create a web application. Its code is shown below −

Spring Boot Starter Test dependency is used for writing Test cases. Its code is shown below −

Auto Configuration

Spring Boot Auto Configuration automatically configures your Spring application based on the JAR dependencies you added in the project. For example, if MySQL database is on your class path, but you have not configured any database connection, then Spring Boot auto configures an in-memory database.

For this purpose, you need to add @EnableAutoConfiguration annotation or @SpringBootApplication annotation to your main class file. Then, your Spring Boot application will be automatically configured.

Observe the following code for a better understanding −

Spring Boot Application

The entry point of the Spring Boot Application is the class contains @SpringBootApplication annotation. This class should have the main method to run the Spring Boot application. @SpringBootApplication annotation includes Auto- Configuration, Component Scan, and Spring Boot Configuration.

If you added @SpringBootApplication annotation to the class, you do not need to add the @EnableAutoConfiguration, @ComponentScan and @SpringBootConfiguration annotation. The @SpringBootApplication annotation includes all other annotations.

Observe the following code for a better understanding −

Component Scan

Spring Boot application scans all the beans and package declarations when the application initializes. You need to add the @ComponentScan annotation for your class file to scan your components added in your project.

Observe the following code for a better understanding −

Spring Boot

Spring Boot makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring based Applications that you can «just run».

We take an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with minimum fuss. Most Spring Boot applications need minimal Spring configuration.

If you’re looking for information about a specific version, or instructions about how to upgrade from an earlier release, check out the project release notes section on our wiki.

Features

Create stand-alone Spring applications

Embed Tomcat, Jetty or Undertow directly (no need to deploy WAR files)

Provide opinionated ‘starter’ dependencies to simplify your build configuration

Automatically configure Spring and 3rd party libraries whenever possible

Provide production-ready features such as metrics, health checks, and externalized configuration

Absolutely no code generation and no requirement for XML configuration

Getting Started

Super quick — try the Quickstart Guide.

Or search through all our guides on the Guides homepage.

Talks and videos

Quickstart Your Project

Documentation

Guides

Tutorials

OSS support

Free security updates and bugfixes with support from the Spring community. See VMware Tanzu OSS support policy.

Commercial support

Business support from Spring experts during the OSS timeline, plus extended support after OSS End-Of-Life.
Publicly available releases for critical bugfixes and security issues when requested by customers.

Future release

Generation not yet released, timeline is subject to changes.

About commercial support (*)

A few examples to try out:

Get ahead

VMware offers training and certification to turbo-charge your progress.

Get support

Spring Runtime offers support and binaries for OpenJDK™, Spring, and Apache Tomcat® in one simple subscription.

Upcoming events

Check out all the upcoming events in the Spring community.

This will be a short post more focused towards introducing Spring Boot, We will discuss “What is Spring Boot“? and how Spring Boot is helpful in building Java based enterprise applications.

Introduction

All above issues are more or less related to making sure we have everything before dev team can start working on actual tasks. Now let’s talk about another use case which we use to do with any Spring based application, Let’s say we want to create a web-based application, these are most common steps most of us will be doing on regular basis

This list can grow significantly based on type of our application

All of the above steps seem very to us but they add a lot of overhead to the development team and instead of focusing on solving the actual business problem, initial time will be consumed to ensure that everything is in the correct place to start work. To answer the question “What is Spring Boot”, think of Spring Boot as a tool which can do these initial tasks for us automatically.

Spring Boot works on an opinionated view of the Spring platform being used by us and ensures that team can quickly start working on solving the actual business problem rather than spending time on the initial configurations and setup.Spring Boot provides the following feature out of the box

Let’s take a look at a sample pom.xml for our web application to get an understanding of sample Spring Boot configuration

Just pay close attention to

tag, Spring Boot provides flexibility to run our application as a jar and not forcing us to use war as required packaging type.Let’s take a look at the below image to get an understanding of what is Spring boot and what are it’s different components.

2. Better Dependency Management

3. Auto Configurations

Spring Boot auto configuration is another interesting feature of Spring Boot this is why Spring Boot team say’s that it has opinions.These are some of work Spring Boot will do for you

4. Servlet Container

Do you recall that process of deploying your application on the Servlet container (Tomcat etc.), every time we make those small changes and require to deploy those into the app server to test our changes? Spring Boot provides support for embedded Servlet container and we are no longer require to deploy our application on app server (This can be run easily using standard main method) but at the same time we can access our application on the browser using http:// :

Spring-boot-starter-web entry in our pom.xml will provide embedded servlet container for our web application, Apache Tomcat is the default servlet container provided by Spring Boot, however, Spring boot provides ways to use other servlet containers (all we have to add the required starter for this).

Read our post Building an Application with Spring Boot to start building your application with Spring Boot.

5. Difference between Spring and Spring Boot

If you are starting with Spring Boot, there are multiple questions that might come to your mind:

It’s very important that we understand the difference between Spring framework and Spring Boot. This can help us to take a better decision if we should use Spring Boot or not.

Do You Need to Learn Spring First?

Yes, If you are starting with the Spring framework. Remember Spring Boot is an integration framework and makes it easy to build Spring framework application by providing you with sensible default and bootstrapping all required components. Keep in mind that you still need the understanding of the Spring module which you like to use with the help of Spring Boot.

Why Is Spring Boot So Popular?

There are multiple reasons why Spring Boot is so popular. Spring Boot make it easy to build spring based enterprise application by providing sensible default and configurations. You don’t have to worry about the configurations or dependencies as they are taken care automatically by Spring Boot.

Introduction to Spring Boot

Azhwani • Apr 14, 2020 • spring • 9 mins read

Spring Boot is basically an extension that is built on top of Spring Framework! It aims, in particular, to reduce the time allocated to set up and configure a new application in order to make Spring easier to use!

In this write-up, I will try to explain in details what is Spring Boot and its main features! I will try also to clarify the difference between Spring boot and Spring Framework!

Let’s get started!

Difference between Spring and Spring Boot!

Spring is an open source Java Framework that provides multiple modules like Spring MVC, Spring Batch, Spring Securiry, Spring Data… packed with several great features like inversion of control, dependency injection and loose coupling to simplify the development process of your application!

Unfortunately, spring requires a lot of configuration work that you need to do it manually by yourself.

Working with many modules can make your application dense with numerous Java configuration classes or XML files!

This is one of the main spring drawbacks that Spring Boot solves for you.

To sum things up, Spring boot can be seen as another Spring module, introduced to reduce the boilerplate configuration in order to allow developers focus on the application logic rather than configuration tasks!

What are Spring Boot features?

Spring and Spring MVC are great tools that can come handy if you are looking to develop a web based application. However, as I mentioned above, one of their biggest problems is the configuration!

They do nothing but to configure the dispatcher servlet, the view resolver …

Configuration can become a real challenge if you are developing a complex application! This is where SpringBoot comes to rescue!

To bootstrap your application with almost zero configuration, Spring Boot provides 2 main features:

Auto Configuration

We need also to create some configuration files such as :

Since you don’t necessarily know the syntax of the these files by heart! You need to consult every time the documentation or your old projects to add the exact configuration that wires successulfly the necessary spring beans to the application context.

Things surely get more complicated if you are working on a medium to big sized project!

So, this is where autoconfiguration feature comes to rescue!

Auto-configuration is the most important feature provided by Spring Boot. It allows to automatically configure your application based on the jars that are presents in the Classpath.

In other words, SpringBoot will scan your imported dependencies to produce the configuration needed to bootstrap your application!

Spring boot provides also @SpringBootApplication annotation that does much more than what @EnableAutoConfiguration does! It is actually a combination of three annotations:

@Configuration : allows to enbale Java based configuration!

@ComponentScan : enables compoent-scan feature.

@EnableAutoConfgiuration : enables auto-configuration feature.

Spring Boot starters

Won’t you agree that it would be nice if there is a simple way to manage all the dependencies! This is where starters come into picture!

Starters complete the autoconfiguration feature! They are introduced to address the complexity of dependencies management and reduce the number of manually added dependencies just by adding one fat dependency called starter!

A starter brings to your project a set of ready-in-use convenient dependencies that are commonly used together!

For example, instead of manually adding the following dependencies: Spring, Spring MVC, Jackson (JSON provider)… to develop a web application, you can just add the web starter as in the following example:

Another great advantage is the version management. You are not required anymore to search for which versions are compatible and then add them one by one in pom.xml!

Of course, spring-boot-starter-web is not the only available starter. Depending on what you plan to develop, you will always find a suitable starter. Here are some examples :

Scaffolding your first Spring boot application

In software development context, scaffolding is the name given to tools that are used to generate a standard prototype for your project with all the necessary files and build tools, in order to ease the bootstrapping of a new project!

Spring Boot team provides multiple ways to quickly create and bootstrap your application.

Spring Boot CLI

Spring Initializr

The tool has a great user friendly web interface! All you need to do is just enter your project details and all the required dependencies.

The tool will generate everything for you and ask you to download a zip file containing a skeleton project based on the details you have entered!

You can follow these steps to generate a new project using Spring Initializr:

Select Maven or Gradle as dependency management system. Maven is the default one.

Select your programming language : Java, Kotlin or Groovy. Java is the default one.

Select a version. The last stable release is always the default version.

Enter project metadata : group, artifact, name, description, package …

Select packaging option: JAR or WAR, JAR is default value.

Search and add all the dependencies you want in the Dependencies section.

Click Generate button to generate and download your project as a zip file.

WOW! As you can see! The generated project with Spring Initializr has everything that is needed to get started.

Spring Boot CLI

You do not need to use CLI to work with Spring Boot, but it is definitely the fastest way to bootstrap a new application.

You can visit this officiel link to check how to install Spring Boot CLI in your machine.

Once installed, you can type spring –version to confirm the installation and spring –help to see what you can do with CLI!

To create and initialize a new spring boot project, you need to use init command which uses internally Spring Initializr web app to generate and download the project!

spring help init lists of the available options that you can use with init command.

Let’s try to generate a new maven web application with thymeleaf dependency using init command:

Packaging Spring boot application

Spring boot applications are typically bundled and shipped as single fat JAR or WAR file which includes all of your module/service’s dependencies!

Packaging is the process that packages your application in a single, runnable fat JAR or WAR file! The default packaging is set to JAR.

JAR file includes all the libraries, resources, and metadata files and can be deployed in embedded servers.

WAR file can be deployed to any servlet container out there such as Tomcat or Jetty…

How can you package your spring boot application?

Well, All you need to do is to choose the packaging option you want! You can declare the packaging type in pom.xml!

Summing up:

Spring Boot is a micro framework that allows you to quickly bootstrap Spring based applications using : autoconfiguration and starters concepts!

To enable auto-configuration feature, you can use @EnableAutoConfiguration annotation.

Starters allow to import a set of convenient dependencies in order to set up and configure your application quickly.

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What is Spring Boot?

By Priya Pedamkar

Introduction to Spring Boot

Spring Boot is a Java-based framework used to create spring applications with the help of microservices. It is an open-source framework that provides flexible XML configurations, Database transactions, sturdy batch processing, relaxed administration of REST services and endpoints, and easy workflow in less time than other java frameworks available in the market currently. The various roles in Spring Boot Java Framework are Senior Software Engineer, Spring Java or Application Developer, and Tech Lead or Architect in Spring, whereas the titles can be changed from organization to organization.

Understanding

It has been already made clear what spring boot is? However, though we have already mentioned about what spring boot is, a question that remains is, what is microservice?

Web development, programming languages, Software testing & others

Micro Service can be defined as an architecture that enables developers to develop, organize, and serves individually and independently. Each running service has its own specific function and process; thus, the end result is outputting a frivolous model that supports business applications.

Micro Service offers any developer the aforesaid advantages.

The main purpose of Spring Boot is to ease the process of creating production-grade spring-powered applications and services, given that minimum fuss is created. Putting it in simple words, we can say that it is a framework developed by the ‘Spring Team’ that aids in easing the bootstrapping and creation of any novel Spring Applications. It usually functions by providing defaults for the codes and annotation configuration that will help in quickly starting any new Spring projects in real-time. Furthermore, it also follows the ‘Opinionated Defaults Configuration’ strategy to avoid a lot of boilerplate code and other configurations meant to improve the Unit Test, Development, and Integration Test procedures.

Features

The Spring Boot program has been designed to achieve the below-mentioned goals.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Spring Boot

Given below are the advantages and disadvantages mentioned:

Advantages:

Disadvantage:

How does this Technology help you Grow in your Career?

Now, this is a hot topic among many JAVA developers are now thinking for their career option. Having broadened the horizons of this career, aspiring developers can choose any career mentioned below.

1. Spring Java Developer: One who picks this profession will have the below-mentioned responsibilities.

2. Spring Application Developer: The below-mentioned is the roles and responsibilities of a Spring Application Developer.

3. Tech Lead in Spring: The key responsibilities are:

4. Senior Software Engineer: The key responsibilities of a Senior Software Engineer include:

Conclusion – What is Spring Boot?

By now, it has been very clear that Spring Boot has simplified the task of developing an application with JAVA. It aims to be a front runner in this ever-evolving and expanding application developing arena. Focusing more on developing new configurations to the exciting ones, it takes an opinionated approach. Thus, it gives great relief to the developers.

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