Core Features of Spring Boot

Rod Johnson, CEO of the company behind the foundation of the Spring Framework and dubbed the father of Spring, opened the 2008 Spring Experience conference with a stated mission: reducing Java complexity. The YouTube video titled Story time with Keith Donald Co-Founder SpringSource & Founder SteadyTown 2-27-2014 (https://springbootlearning.com/origin-of-spring), uploaded by TrepHub, is a 90-minute journey back into the early days of Spring guided by Keith Donald, one of Spring’s co-founders. Here too, you’ll find the same mission reinforced.

Java in the mid-2000s was challenging to use, difficult to test, and frankly short on enthusiasm.

But along came a toolkit: the Spring Framework. This toolkit focused on easing developers’ lives. And the excitement was off the charts. The buzz when I attended that 2008 conference was incredible.

Fast forward to 2013 at the SpringOne 2GX conference, the Spring team unveiled Spring Boot: a new approach to writing Spring apps. This approach resulted in standing-room attendance. I was in the room when co-leads Phil Webb and Dave Syer gave their first talk. In a room designed like a stadium lecture hall, the seats were packed. The opening keynote revealed a revolutionary way to build more extensive and powerful apps… with less.

This ability to do more with less using Spring Boot is what we’ll discover together as we journey into the world of the third generation of Spring Boot.

In this chapter, we’ll learn about the core features of Spring Boot, which show fundamentally how it does less with more. This is to get a taste of how Spring Boot operates, allowing us to leverage it in later chapters as we build applications. The key aspects that make Spring Boot powerful while retaining its flexibility to serve user needs will be described in this chapter.

In this chapter, we’ll cover the following topics:

• Autoconfiguring Spring beans
• Adding components of the Spring portfolio using Spring Boot starters
• Customizing the setup with configuration properties
• Managing application dependencies