Comparing Spring Boot and Spring MVC

Spring offers the Spring MVC framework for developing web applications. A very common question in the minds of new learners is the difference between Spring Boot and Spring MVC and which one to use for developing web applications. Both Spring Boot and Spring MVC play a separate role and both are designed to solve different problems as we will see in this lesson.

Spring framework

Spring Boot and Spring MVC are both components of the Spring framework. Spring offers dependency injection and inversion of control, which provides good integration with other frameworks. It defines beans using different annotations and autowires them. Spring helps build loosely coupled applications that are easy to unit test. It also eliminates plumbing code like exception handling, establishing and closing connections, etc.

Spring MVC

Spring MVC is an HTTP oriented Spring framework, which is concerned with developing web applications. It makes use of the Model View Controller (MVC) design pattern to achieve separation of concerns, where:

• Model: Represents the application's data and business logic.

• View: Renders the user interface for interacting with the application.

• Controller: Handles incoming requests, processes them, and determines the appropriate response.