8. Introducing 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”.

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 (e.g. embedded servers, security, metrics, health checks, externalized configuration).
• Absolutely no code generation and no requirement for XML configuration.