Spring is undoubtedly the most popular Java-based framework. It is widely used in the industry for creating web and enterprise applications. The reason for its popularity is its widespread features. While most of the frameworks generally focus on one or two things, Spring caters to all the parameters strongly. In fact, it addresses the modern features and requirements perfectly which is why it is a favorite among the developers. But with the increase and addition of new features, the developers find it difficult to configure Spring applications. It has become tedious and prone to mistakes and errors for them. Therefore, to address this issue of complicity in configuration, Spring has brought forward the Spring Boot. But before understanding Spring Boot in Java, you need to understand the problem Spring has that led to the emergence of Spring Boot.
Spring and Its Configuration Issues –
At the very beginning, Spring only provided the option of XML-based approach for configuring beans. Then they introduced XML-based DSLs, Annotations, and JavaConfig-based approaches for configuring beans. In fact, one can mix up the approaches for their applications. However, there is no fixed or universal approach that can fit all applications. Therefore, the applications used to become configuring beans approach based. It is really inconvenient for the developers as they had to find out the compatible libraries for the specific Spring version and there were certain things that were must for any application and Spring had no option to configure them automatically. There is a desperate need for Spring to do all the common and usual things automatically so that the developers could concentrate on developing.
What Is Spring Boot?
Spring Boot does exactly what the developers wanted for so long. Not only does it do the things automatically as a developer wanted, there is an option to overload the defaults if there is any such requirement. In fact, Spring Boot is built on top of Spring framework. What it basically does is it provides a simple yet faster way to set up an application, configure it and run it smoothly. As you know that in the Spring framework, one needs to configure everything themselves which is tiresome and there could be a lot of errors. Moreover, there would have been too many configuration files to deal with.
Spring Boot configures all the features automatically and you can launch the application with just one click. The deployment process also gets easy for any application. The followings are the features of Spring Boot.
Features Of Spring Boot –
The biggest feature of Spring Boot is its auto-configuration. But the auto-configuration is done intelligently and it takes into account the surrounding dependencies and the parameters the developers provide. That is why there is no chance of errors in the configuration and it is far better than doing manually.
Standalone –
One of the biggest reasons behind its popularity is its standalone feature. This means that you do not have to deploy your application to any web server. All you have to do is click on the appropriate buttons and give the run commands and it is ready to run and get you the expected output.
Intelligence –
Many developers hate artificial intelligence, however, it is a blessing for many. When a framework can decide itself what to do to configuration anything based on various changing parameters in different applications, you cannot ask for more. However, a lot of developers do not enjoy this freedom and they do not like the idea that they do not have control over it. Spring Boot decides how to do things for itself on its own.
Manual Configuration Vs Spring Boot Configuration –
Let us compare the steps of configuring an application in Java manually and that with Spring Boot.
Manually, the first step is to package your application which is also a necessary step for Spring Boot. Therefore, all those claiming that Spring Boot is allowing less control, they are mistaken. Anyways, the next step is to choose the type of web server you want to use for your application and you have to download that. This is where it gets crazy as different types of applications need different types of the web server and choose the wrong one will make the application erroneous. Apart from downloading the web server, you have to configure the web server. At last, you have to pay your attention to the deployment process after you configure and start your web server.
But with Spring Boot, it is a cakewalk. The first step is necessary which is packaging your application. Then all you have to do is use simple commands to get it done. You can simply copy and paste the command to deploy and run your application. It is uniform for all application. There is no need for choosing and downloading web server as the web server is embedded.
