What is Spring Boot?

Spring Boot is an open-source Java framework that was developed by Pivotal in 2014 and simplifies the task of deploying Java enterprise web applications. It is a project built on top of the Spring framework that provides an efficient way to set up and run applications.

Spring Boot consists of the Spring Framework and Embedded Servers. Because it uses convention over configuration software design, it does not require XML configuration.

Spring Boot was created to achieve the following goals:

• Simplify the process of developing production-ready Spring applications

• Avoid XML configuration in Spring

• Reduce development time by decreasing the number of needed import statements

• Provide an opinionated development approach

Advantages to using Spring Boot

• Creates stand-alone Spring applications that only need to be started using Java -jar

• Provides features for production such as health checks and externalized configuration

• Provides a CLI tool for developing and testing your application

• Rapidly increases productivity

• Reduces development time

• Easy to learn and build spring applications

Limitations of Spring Boot

Sometimes, Spring Boot will use dependencies that are not actually used in the application. This can increase the size of your application.

If you’re interested in learning how to implement Microservices using Spring Boot, check out our Introduction to Microservices course.