Spring Boot Tutorial Part One (Introduction)

 

What is Spring Boot? 

Spring Boot is a fantastic platform for Java developers to create a stand-alone, production-grade spring application that can be started straight away. You may get started with only a few settings rather than a full Spring configuration.

The Java Spring Framework (Spring Framework) is a popular open-source enterprise framework for developing standalone, production-grade Java Virtual Machine applications (JVM).

Through three essential functionalities, Java Spring Boot (Spring Boot) helps develop a web application and microservices using Spring Framework faster and easier:

• Autoconfiguration
• An opinionated approach to configuration
• The ability to create standalone applications

 

Benefits of Using Spring Boot

• Reduce the Development Time

• Reduce the Time Spent on Development and Increase the Overall Efficiency of the Development Team

• Help to Autoconfiguration All Components for a Production-grade Spring App

• Facilitate the Creation and Testing of Java-based Applications by Providing a Default Setup for Unit and Integration Tests

• Help Avoid All the Manual Work of Writing Boilerplate Code, Annotations, and Complex XML Configurations

• Come with Embedded HTTP Servers like Jetty and Tomcat to Test Web Applications

• The Integration of Spring Boot with the Spring Ecosystem Which Includes Spring Data, Spring Security, Spring ORM, and Spring JDBC is Easy

• Provide Many Plugins That Developers can Use to Work With Embedded and In-memory Databases Smoothly and Readily

• Allow for Easily Connecting With Database and Queue Services like Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Solr, ElasticSearch, Rabbit MQ, ActiveMQ, and Many More

• Provide Admin Support

• Ease the Dependency and Come With Embedded Servlet Container

• Offer Flexibility in Configuring XML Configurations, Java Beans, and Database Transaction

• Offer Easy Access to Command Line Interface Which Make the Development and Testing of Spring Boot Apps Built With Java or Groovy Agile

• Large Community and Many Training Programs to Facilitate the Familiarization Period

• Simple Setup and Management

• Easy Start
  

• Additionally out-of-the-box Functionality

• Reduce Amounts of Source Code

• The Ability to Create Standalone Applications

• No Need for the Deployment of war Files

 

Disadvantages of Using Spring Boot

• Lack of control. Spring Boot creates a lot of unused dependencies, resulting in a large deployment file

• The complex and time-consuming process of converting a legacy or an existing Spring project to a Spring Boot application

• Not suitable for large-scale projects

• If you have never worked with Spring before and want to learn about proxies, dependency injection, and AOP programming, it is not recommended to start with Spring Boot because it doesn’t cover most of these details

• Since the framework has been built to be agile and lightweight mainly focusing on APIs and microservices to be built using the framework, therefore it should not be used for monolithic applications

• You really have to understand a lot of the underlying Spring systems (and a bit of Spring history too), along with some advanced topics in order to modify and troubleshoot it

• Spring Boot works well with microservices. The Spring Boot artifacts can be deployed directly into Docker containers. However, some developers don’t recommend the framework for building large and monolithic apps

• If you are not familiar with other projects of the Spring ecosystem like Spring Security, Spring AMQP, Spring Integration, etc.), using them with Spring Boot will make you miss many concepts that you would grasp if you had started using them independently

 

Features of Springboot

• Web Development

  It is a great Spring module for developing web applications. Using embedded Tomcat, Jetty, or Undertow, we can simply develop a self-contained HTTP server. The spring-boot-starter-web module may be used to quickly start and operate the application.
  

• SpringApplication

  It is a class that makes it simple to start a Spring application from the main method. Simply using the static run() method will launch your program.
  

• Application Events and Listeners

  Spring Boot handles a number of tasks through events. It enables us to construct a factories file for adding listeners. The ApplicationListener key can be used to refer to it.
  

• Admin Features
  

  Spring Boot allows you to enable administrative functions for your application. It is used to remotely access and administer applications. The spring.application.admin.enabled property may be used to enable it.
  

• Externalized Configuration

  We may externalize our configuration with Spring Boot, allowing us to operate with the same application in different environments. To externalize configuration, the application uses YAML files.

• Properties Files
  

  Application Properties are abundant in Spring Boot. As a result, we may utilize that in our project's properties file. Property values such as server-port = 8082 and others are set in the properties file. It aids in the organization of application properties.

• YAML Support
  

  It provides convenient way for specifying hierarchical configuration. It is a superset of JSON. The SpringApplication class automatically support YAML. It is successful alternative of properties.

• Type-safe Configuration
  

  Strong type-safe configuration is provided to govern and validate the configuration of application. Application configuration is always a crucial task which should be type-safe. We can also use annotation provided by this library.

• Logging
  

  Spring Boot uses Common logging for all internal logging. Logging dependencies are managed by default. We should not change logging dependencies, if there is no required customization is needed.

• Security
  

  Spring Boot applications are spring bases web applications. So, it is secure by default with basic authentication on all HTTP endpoints. A rich set of Endpoints are available for develop a secure Spring Boot application.

 

Goals of Spring Boot

• To provide a radically faster and widely accessible ‘getting started’ experience for all Spring development

• To be opinionated out of the box, but get out of the way quickly as requirements start to diverge from the defaults

• To provide a range of non-functional features that are common to large classes of projects (e.g., embedded servers, security, metrics, health checks, externalized configuration)

• To avoid complex XML configuration in Spring

• To reduce the development time and run the application independently

• Offer an easier way of getting started with the application

 

Performance

• Component Scanning Slows Start-up

  You may find yourself utilizing the @SpringBootApplication annotation by default to automatically configure your application. This has a handful of negative consequences. One is to make component scanning possible. This searches the classes for annotations like @Component, which are Spring "stereotypes." This is handy, especially at first, but it has two negative consequences: 

• It slows application start-up time. This will have a greater impact if you have a large application or a large number of integration tests that need to start up the application to run
• It may load beans you do not want or need

         Remove the @SpringBootApplication and @ComponentScan annotations to prevent             component scanning. Then, in your setup, you'll need to make each bean explicit.

• Auto-Configuration Can Load More Than You Need.

• Change Servlet Container to Undertow

That concludes part one of this Spring Boot tutorial. We've looked at Spring Boot briefly in this blog. If you want to learn more about Spring Boot, visit its website, find it on Github or check out this repository of examples.

In the next part of this tutorial, we'll learn more about Spring Boot and how to build a CRUD application. Leave a comment below if you have any questions or comments.