Spring Boot Reference Guide

If you are getting started with Spring Boot, or “Spring” in general, start by reading this section. It answers the basic “what?”, “how?” and “why?” questions. It includes an introduction to Spring Boot, along with installation instructions. We then walk you through building your first Spring Boot application, discussing some core principles as we go.

Introducing Spring Boot

Spring Boot helps you to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring-based applications that you can run. We take an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries so that 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 by using java -jar or more traditional war deployments.

Our primary goals are:

• Provide a radically faster and widely accessible getting-started experience for all Spring development.

• Be opinionated out of the box but get out of the way quickly as requirements start to diverge from the defaults.

• Provide a range of non-functional features that are common to large classes of projects (such as embedded servers, security, metrics, health checks, and externalized configuration).

• Absolutely no code generation (when not targeting native image) and no requirement for XML configuration