What is Spring Boot?

Spring Boot makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring based Applications that you can “just run”. We take an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with minimum fuss. Most Spring Boot applications need very little Spring configuration. You can use Spring Boot to create Java applications that can be started using java -jar or more traditional war deployments. We also provide a command line tool that runs “spring scripts”.

Most Spring Boot applications need very little Spring configuration. The most important feature of Spring Framework is Dependency Injection.

Features

• Create stand-alone Spring applications
• Embed Tomcat, Jetty or Undertow directly (no need to deploy WAR files)
• Provide opinionated 'starter' POMs to simplify your Maven configuration
• Automatically configure Spring whenever possible
• Provide production-ready features such as metrics, health checks and externalized configuration
• Absolutely no code generation and no requirement for XML configuration

Spring Boot auto-configuration attempts to automatically configure your Spring application based on the jar dependencies that you have added. For example, If HSQLDB is on your classpath, and you have not manually configured any database connection beans, then we will auto-configure an in-memory database.

One of the biggest advantages of packaging your application as jar and using an embedded HTTP server is that you can run your application as you would any other. Debugging Spring Boot applications is also easy; you don’t need any special IDE plugins or extensions. SpringApplication will load properties from application.properties files.

Spring Boot uses Commons Logging for all internal logging, but leaves the underlying log implementation open. Default configurations are provided for Java Util Logging, Log4J2 and Logback. In each case loggers are pre-configured to use console output with optional file output also available.

By default, If you use the ‘Starters’, Logback will be used for logging. Appropriate Logback routing is also included to ensure that dependent libraries that use Java Util Logging, Commons Logging, Log4J or SLF4J will all work correctly.

Spring Boot is well suited for web application development. You can easily create a self-contained HTTP server using embedded Tomcat, Jetty, or Undertow. Most web applications will use the spring-boot-starter-web module to get up and running quickly.

As well as REST web services, you can also use Spring MVC to serve dynamic HTML content. Spring MVC supports a variety of templating technologies including Thymeleaf, FreeMarker and JSPs. Many other templating engines also ship their own Spring MVC integrations.

Spring Boot includes auto-configuration support for the following templating engines:

1. FreeMarker
2. Groovy
3. Thymeleaf
4. Mustache

JSPs should be avoided if possible, there are several known limitations when using them with embedded servlet containers.

Spring Boot provides an /error mapping by default that handles all errors in a sensible way, and it is registered as a ‘global’ error page in the servlet container. For machine clients it will produce a JSON response with details of the error, the HTTP status and the exception message. For browser clients there is a ‘whitelabel’ error view that renders the same data in HTML format (to customize it just add a View that resolves to ‘error’). To replace the default behaviour completely you can implement ErrorController and register a bean definition of that type, or simply add a bean of type ErrorAttributes to use the existing mechanism but replace the contents.

If you want to display a custom HTML error page for a given status code, you add a file to an /error folder. Error pages can either be static HTML (i.e. added under any of the static resource folders) or built using templates. The name of the file should be the exact status code or a series mask.