Spring Boot Introduction

The entry point for any Spring Application is a class decorated with @SpringBootApplication annotation. This class contains the main method which will be invoked when the application boots.

Spring Boot uses a lot of annotation to increase developer productivity. For Applications to discover and initialize other components, Spring Boot uses @ComponentScan annotation. We can specify other Classes or packages that need to be scanned and initialized.

Spring boot supports deferent ways of reading application configurations. We can provide configurations in YAML files or properties files or Java POJO Classes.

Spring Boot supports Spring Profiles, which is a kind of different set of configuration values for different environments. For instance, we can have different database credentials for Production vs Test environments. Here we can put the database credentials values different under different Profiles.

Spring Boot supports different Build environments and technologies. For instance, we can use a maven to configure the build infrastructure, or we can also use Gradle, etc.

Spring boot can be used to develop a range of applications along with using different third party libraries. Spring boot starters provide pre-bundled dependencies for a particular type of application. In the Spring Boot Framework, all the starters follow a similar naming pattern: spring-boot-starter-*, where * denotes a particular type of application. For example if we want to develop an application based on Elastic Search we can use the starter spring-boot-starter-data-elasticsearch to bootstrap the application.