An Ultimate Spring Boot Tutorial For Beginners

Do you know why I love Spring Boot? While it’s true that Spring Boot demands a lot from programmers in terms of skills, learning, and configuration, it’s — no doubt — a solid framework for creating an object and providing them with dependency, reducing the complexity of the code you would have otherwise written with legacy JavaScript. If you are beginner, this Spring Boot tutorial is going to be an excellent resource to give an edge in your coding career, helping you to build applications with quick deployment, scalability, and minimum config, and less production time.

Let’s First Go Back To 2012

The origin of Spring Boot can be traced back to October 2012 when, when a client, Mike Youngstrom, made a Jira request suggesting to bootstrap the Spring framework so that it can be quickly deployed. Hence, Spring Boot came into existence in early 2013 with the first version, Spring Boot 1.0, being released in April 2014 followed by updates.

What is Spring Boot?

Developed by Pivotal Team to build standalone and production-ready applications, Spring Boot is an open-source JavaScript-based framework. What’s interesting about Spring Boot is that developers can get started with minimum configuration without needing an entire config setup. Here’s why Spring Boot is better than conventional coding:

1. Spring Boot provides a flexible and efficient approach to configure Java Beans and database transactions.
2. Offers linear scalability to efficiently handle batch processing and manages the REST endpoints.
3. In Spring Boot, everything is auto-configured, therefore eliminating the need of manual configurations.
4. Offers Embedded Servlet Container with annotation-based Spring apps and dependency management.
5. Spring Boot minimizes the need for writing multiple boilerplate codes, XML configs and annotations.

The Difference Between Standard Spring and Spring Boot

Now that we have an idea on what is Spring Boot and how it emerged, let’s note down the fundamental differences between the standard Spring framework and Spring Boot.

Spring Framework

1. Spring framework provides the comprehensive infrastructure for developing Java applications.
2. Spring is packed with pretty handy features such as Dependency Injection and modules such as Spring MVC, Spring ORM and Spring Security.
3. Aimed towards building Java Enterprise Edition (EE) development more easier and efficient.

Spring Boot

1. Spring Boot is an extension of the Spring framework that doesn’t require boilerplate configs for building Spring apps.
2. A few of the features in Spring Boot are embedded server to avoid complexity, metrics, external configuration, and automatic configs for Spring functionality — when possible.
3. Spring Boot provides Rapid Application Deployment (RAD) to the Spring framework for faster application deployment.

Awesome Features of Spring Boot That Make It Compelling To Developers

Since Spring boot is built upon the conventional Spring framework, it provides every feature of Spring with an added benefit of being easier to configure than Spring. Let’s now look at some other prominent features of Spring Boot:

1. Spring Boot avoids heavy configuration of conventional XML and unlike Spring MVC Project, in Spring Boot, everything is auto-configured and developers just need to use proper presets to utilize any functionality.
2. Creating a REST API is simple in Spring Boot and it provides easy maintenance of REST endpoints. Developers need the annotations @RestController and @RequestMapping(/endPoint) over the controller to get it done.
3. In Spring Boot, application deployment is effortless since the war and jar files can be deployed in the TomCat server. That too, with the option of running the instances of the TomCat server directly on cloud servers.
4. Since Spring Boot is a Microservice Based Architecture, it eliminates the need of a single code containing all the features. Instead, each feature can be divided into subsystems to better handle database management.
5. As a bonus of having a Microservice Based Architecture, applications built with Spring Boot can be migrated easily, which in turn, makes debugging easier and can be integrated into different technologies suited to it.

Why Every Developer Must Learn Spring Boot?

Especially if you are a beginner, Spring Boot provides tonnes of feature that are proven to simplify the development and maintenance process. Here are the reasons why every developer and development firm should use Spring Boot.

1. Dependency Management: Veteran developers in the industry before the existence of Spring Boot dread the dependency management since it was quite an uphill task even for seasoned programmers. And now, since Spring Boot manages dependency management, you don’t need to mention the version of the dependency.
2. Designs Standalone Applications: Spring Boot allows developers to design standalone, production-grade, and deployable applications capable of running on any website without wasting time. With little configuration from developers’ side, Spring Boot takes care of the configuration and deployment an embedded web server.
3. Opinionated Configuration: I just cannot express how cool this feature is! Spring Boot makes an opinionated view prior to building or deploying a new Spring application. Automatic configuration is all that Spring Boot does on its own, and hence, developers don’t need to spend time configuring the same thing over and over.

Frequently Asked Questions

Question 01: Which is better; Spring or Spring Boot?

Answer: Spring Boot retains all the functionality of the standard Spring framework while making the development and deployment process much easier. Therefore, Spring Boot can be considered as an updated version of Spring.

Question 02: What are some of the best Spring Boot tutorials available for free?

Answer: During my learning stage, I benefitted from free tutorials available online such as Spring Boot Tutorial — How to build fast and modern Java apps by FreeCodeCamp and Spring Boot Tutorial for Beginners by Edureka.

Question 03: What are the top Java Spring Boot interview questions for experienced developers?

Answer: If you are a Spring Boot developer, whether beginner and seasoned, Geekster has published an informative article on 30 Java Spring Boot Interview Questions and Answers helping you to prepare for your next dev interview.

Wrapping Up

Let’s recap what we learnt. In this Spring Boot tutorial, we discussed what is Spring Boot, its differences as compared to the standard Spring framework, and why it’s an awesome tool for developers. Following this Spring Boot tutorial, we will be publishing more exciting blogs on programming. Till then, here’s something for you for further reading.

Further Reading: How To Implement Security In Spring Boot Project?