What is Spring Boot, and what are its main features?

Category : Interview Questions | Sub Category : Spring Boot Interview Questions | By Prasad Bonam Last updated: 2023-08-04 00:11:21 Viewed : 293


What is Spring Boot, and what are its main features?

Spring Boot is an open-source framework developed by Pivotal (now VMware) that is built on top of the Spring Framework. It aims to simplify the development of production-ready, stand-alone, and production-grade Spring applications. Spring Boot takes an opinionated approach to configuration and automatically sets up defaults, reducing the need for boilerplate code and manual configuration. It is widely used in Java development to create robust and scalable applications quickly.

Main features of Spring Boot:

  1. Auto-configuration: One of the key features of Spring Boot is auto-configuration. It automatically configures beans and components based on classpath settings, reducing the need for explicit configuration. Spring Boot will attempt to set up sensible defaults for various components based on the dependencies present in the project.

  2. Stand-alone Applications: Spring Boot applications can be packaged as stand-alone executable JAR files. These JAR files contain an embedded web server (Tomcat, Jetty, or Undertow) and all required dependencies, allowing you to run the application using the java -jar command without any additional setup.

  3. Starter Dependencies: Spring Boot provides a set of "starter" dependencies that encapsulate common configurations for various use cases. For example, spring-boot-starter-web includes everything needed to build a web application with Spring Web, such as Tomcat, Spring MVC, and Jackson for JSON processing.

  4. Spring Boot Actuator: Spring Boot Actuator provides production-ready features to monitor and manage the application. It exposes various endpoints, such as health, metrics, info, etc., which can be used to monitor the applications health and performance.

  5. Production-Ready Defaults: Spring Boot sets up production-ready defaults for various features, such as security, data access, logging, and more. This helps developers quickly build applications that are ready for deployment without spending much time on configuration.

  6. Externalized Configuration: Spring Boot allows you to configure your application using external properties files (e.g., application.properties or application.yml). This makes it easy to change configurations without modifying the code.

  7. Spring Boot CLI: Spring Boot offers a Command-Line Interface (CLI) that allows developers to create and run Spring Boot applications using a simple and concise syntax.

  8. Devtools: Spring Boot Devtools provides a set of developer tools that enable hot swapping and automatic restart of the application during development, improving the development experience.

  9. Testing Support: Spring Boot provides robust testing support, making it easier to write integration tests and unit tests for your application.

  10. Actuator Security: Spring Boot Actuator comes with built-in security features to protect sensitive endpoints. It allows you to control which endpoints are accessible and requires authentication for sensitive endpoints.

These features make Spring Boot a popular choice for developing Java applications as it streamlines the development process, reduces boilerplate code, and ensures that applications are production-ready out of the box.


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