Introduction to SpringBoot

Application development is crucial since it facilitates our daily activities. A food ordering application that facilitates online ordering must utilize a frontend user interface, backend server-side programming, and a database for data persistence. Since the mid-1990s, Java has been a popular option among programmers for software design, resulting in the creation of several frameworks to facilitate software development using Java.

To facilitate efficient development, many frameworks were established, including Struts, Spring, and ORM technologies such as Hibernate and Toplink for database operations.

Spring has significantly advanced in recent years with the introduction of several new modules, including Spring Boot, Spring Security, and Spring Cloud. This series of courses will explore the Spring Boot framework and its diverse capabilities, which contribute to its popularity in application development.

Advantages of Spring Boot

• The principal benefit of Spring Boot is the facilitation of auto-configuration for the project. This alleviates the workload for programmers and conserves significant time. 
• It utilizes annotations that are straightforward and substitute the conventional XML-based setting in Spring MVC. 
• Offers an integrated servlet container that facilitates the seamless bootstrapping of a production-ready application. 
• It facilitates the construction of a fat JAR for Spring applications, including all dependencies, hence allowing for direct execution. 
• The microservices architecture may be efficiently constructed using the Spring Boot framework, which also offers ideas like Spring Boot Starter for dependency management.

What is spring-boot-starter?

Creating a project necessitates several external libraries, including core Java and associated frameworks. As previously stated, Spring Boot facilitates auto-configuration based on the JARs present in the classpath. We will examine the auto-configuration during the project setup.

Spring Boot Starter facilitates the efficient management of dependencies, in contrast to Spring MVC, which lacks the idea of starters.

Starters enable effective dependency management for your spring based project. For example, if we want to use hibernate as the ORM tool, we need the hibernate maven script, a pom.xml file of the project, as follows.

  
    org.hibernate
    hibernate-core
    5.4.2.Final

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Happy Exploring!