What is Spring Boot

Spring Boot is a project that is built on the top of the Spring Framework. It provides an easier and faster way to set up, configure, and run both simple and web-based applications.

It is a Spring module that provides the RAD (Rapid Application Development) feature to the Spring Framework. It is used to create a stand-alone Spring-based application that you can just run because it needs minimal Spring configuration.

Advantages of Spring Boot

• It creates stand-alone Spring applications that can be started using Java -jar.
• It tests web applications easily with the help of different Embedded HTTP servers such as Tomcat, Jetty, etc. We don’t need to deploy WAR files.
• It provides opinionated ‘starter’ POMs to simplify our Maven configuration.
• It provides production-ready features such as metrics, health - checks, and externalized configuration. There is no requirement for XML configuration.
• It offers a CLI tool for developing and testing the Spring Boot application.
• It offers the number of plug-ins.
• It also minimizes writing multiple boilerplate codes (the code that has to be included in many places with little or no alteration), XML configuration, and annotations.
• It increases productivity and reduces development time.

Spring MVC and Thymeleaf

• Spring MVC application contains:
  • @Controller classes - responsible for preparing a model map with data and selecting a view to be rendered
  • model map allows for the complete abstraction of the view technology, and in the case of Thymeleaf, it is transformed into a Thymeleaf context object that makes all the defined variables available to expressions executed in templates
  • Spring model attributes:
    • model attributes - Spring MVC calls the pieces of data that can be accessed during the execution of views
    • context variables - Thymeleaf language version of model attributes
  • Request parameters
    • Request parameters - easily accessed in Thymeleaf views, and passed from the client to server
  • Session attributes
    • Session attributes - can be accessed by using the session. prefix or using #session
  • ServletContext attributes
    • ServletContext attributes - shared between requests and sessions, and to access ServletContext attributes in Thymeleaf you can use the #servletContext. prefix
  • Spring beans
    • Thymeleaf allows accessing beans registered at the Spring Application Context with the @beanName syntax