Spring boot - Quickly bootstrap your web-service or web-app.

Now a days, for quick web-services and web-app implementations, I have started using Spring boot, Just I wanted to share my experiences; in this post, I am just covering the basics of Spring boot framework.

Essentially, Spring boot helps you to,

• Get rid of manual Spring configurations and absolutely the XML files for configuration. This is a great boost for first timers. :)
• Create a stand-alone or uber jars and instantly run that on production boxes, with the help of embedded servlet containers like Jetty, Tomcat, etc. Of course, users could opt for container of their choice. Default is Embedded Tomcat. This is again a great boost as configuring embedded containers generally a bit tedious and time consuming.
• get simplified Maven configurations, with the set of Starter POMs, Spring-boot website says, it is opinionated, but in my view, it is great as this is created by experts in the field and must have been tested fully for optimal dependencies. 
• make your app or service, production ready (with just adding dependency for Spring actuator) by providing various end-points for health-check, metrics, etc. This is awesome as it makes all your services look uniform when it comes to managing. This reminds me DRY (Don't repeat yourself) for API design :)
• Simplify spring annotations, like "SpringBootApplication" annotation, which effectively covers essential annotations like Configuration, ComponentScan, etc.

Lets get our hands dirt, to experience Spring boot. 

Create a simple Maven project with your IDE and change your pom, like given below,

This POM is enough for our RESTful service, :) Now can you see how spring boot helps to minimize the maven configurations to the core minimum. 

As you see, POM sets that spring-boot-starter-parent as the parent pom for the project, this is essential part of Spring boot project as it has all the essential core components for the standalone spring based web-service. And in dependencies section, the needed dependencies shall be added, we added the artifact, spring-boot-starter-web. Real power of spring boot lies in this, as it would auto-configure the project as per the dependencies. With spring-boot-starter-web, needed web mvc configurations will be added up automagically :) If you want to have Velocity template engine for your View, you could simply add up the dependency,  spring-boot-starter-velocity, which would make boot to add the essential configurations for Velocity engine. Cool, right ?

To get the service to complete, you may want to add the controller, like given below,



Code is pretty self evident, it handles the end-point, /hello, with simple response, "Hello!".

The main file should be placed under the right package, in our example, this file has to be placed in the package, in.blogspot.karthikpresumes



The annotation, SpringBootApplication is very important, it is an annotation which simply covers all the essential annotations, like Configuration, ComponentScan, etc.

The entire project is hosted here, https://github.com/karthikmit/SpringBootBlog.git

Main reference:

http://projects.spring.io/spring-boot/

Thanks for reading!