A Comparison Between Spring and Spring Boot – Java Tutorials for dummies

February 9th, 2023

A Comparison Between Spring and Spring Boot

1. Overview

In this tutorial, we’re going to look at the differences between the standard Spring frameworks and Spring Boot.

We’ll focus on and discuss how the modules of Spring, like MVC and Security, differ when used in core Spring versus when used with Boot.

2. What Is Spring?

Simply put, the Spring framework provides comprehensive infrastructure support for developing Java applications.

It’s packed with some nice features like Dependency Injection, and out of the box modules like:

Spring JDBC
Spring MVC
Spring Security
Spring AOP
Spring ORM
Spring Test

These modules can drastically reduce the development time of an application.

For example, in the early days of Java web development, we needed to write a lot of boilerplate code to insert a record into a data source. By using the JDBCTemplate of the Spring JDBC module, we can reduce it to a few lines of code with only a few configurations.

3. What Is Spring Boot?

Spring Boot is basically an extension of the Spring framework, which eliminates the boilerplate configurations required for setting up a Spring application.

It takes an opinionated view of the Spring platform, which paves the way for a faster and more efficient development ecosystem.

Here are just a few of the features in Spring Boot:

Opinionated ‘starter’ dependencies to simplify the build and application configuration
Embedded server to avoid complexity in application deployment
Metrics, Health check, and externalized configuration
Automatic config for Spring functionality – whenever possible

Let’s get familiar with both of these frameworks step by step.

4. Maven Dependencies

First of all, let’s look at the minimum dependencies required to create a web application using Spring:

				
					<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-web</artifactId>
    <version>5.3.5</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-webmvc</artifactId>
    <version>5.3.5</version>
</dependency>

5. MVC Configuration

Let’s explore the configuration required to create a JSP web application using both Spring and Spring Boot.

Spring requires defining the dispatcher servlet, mappings, and other supporting configurations. We can do this using either the web.xml file or an Initializer class:

public class MyWebAppInitializer implements WebApplicationInitializer {
 
    @Override
    public void onStartup(ServletContext container) {
        AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext context
          = new AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext();
        context.setConfigLocation("com.baeldung");
 
        container.addListener(new ContextLoaderListener(context));
 
        ServletRegistration.Dynamic dispatcher = container
          .addServlet("dispatcher", new DispatcherServlet(context));
         
        dispatcher.setLoadOnStartup(1);
        dispatcher.addMapping("/");
    }
}

We also need to add the @EnableWebMvc annotation to a @Configuration class, and define a view-resolver to resolve the views returned from the controllers:

1. Overview

2. What Is Spring?

3. What Is Spring Boot?

4. Maven Dependencies

5. MVC Configuration

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