This is beginners to expert Spring Boot tutorial.  We have used the latest release of Spring Boot 2+ in all examples. This tutorial gives you all the possible Spring boot features that are required to build a Spring-based enterprise J2EE web applications or RESTful APIs. Spring Boot uses a completely new development model to make Java Development very easy by avoiding some tedious development steps and boilerplate code and configuration.

What is the Spring Boot?

Spring Boot is a brand new framework from the team at Pivotal, designed to simplify the bootstrapping and development of a new Spring application. The framework takes an opinionated approach to configuration, freeing developers from the need to define a boilerplate configuration. It provides defaults for code and annotation configuration to quick start new Spring projects within no time.

Spring Boot 2.0 requires Java 8 or later. Java 6 and 7 are no longer supported. It also requires Spring Framework 5.0

Spring Boot Features

1. Create stand-alone Spring applications
2. Embed Tomcat, Jetty or Undertow directly (no need to deploy WAR files)
3. Provide opinionated 'starter' dependencies to simplify your build configuration
4. Automatically configure Spring and 3rd party libraries whenever possible
5. Provide production-ready features such as metrics, health checks, and externalized configuration
6. Absolutely no code generation and no requirement for XML configuration

Spring Boot Tutorial

Spring Boot Basics

>> Overview of Spring Boot Starter Parent

>> Important Spring Boot Starters with Examples

>> Spring Boot How to Change Port and Context Path

>> Spring Boot 2 Deploy WAR file to External Tomcat
>> Different Ways of Running Spring Boot Application

Spring Boot REST API Development

>> Spring Boot 2 Hibernate 5 MySQL CRUD REST API Tutorial

>> Spring Boot 2 JPA MySQL CRUD Example

>> Spring Boot CRUD REST APIs Validation Example

>> Spring Data JPA Auditing with Spring Boot 2 and MySQL Example

>> Spring Boot 2 Exception Handling for REST APIs

>> Spring Boot 2 Logging SLF4j Logback and LOG4j2 Example
>> Spring Boot 2 + Jersey REST + JPA + Hibernate 5 CRUD REST APIs Example

Spring Boot Web Application Development

>> Spring MVC + Spring Boot2 + JSP + JPA + Hibernate 5 + MySQL Example

>> Spring Boot 2 MVC Web Application Thymeleaf JPA MySQL Example
>> Spring Boot JPA Multiple Data Sources Example

Spring Boot with Spring Security

>> Spring Boot + Spring MVC + Role Based Spring Security + JPA + Thymeleaf + MySQL Tutorial

Spring Boot Configuration

>> Spring Boot Java Based Configuration Example
>> Spring Boot XML Configuration Example
>> Migrating from Spring to Spring Boot

Spring Boot Testing

>> Spring Data JPA Repository Testing using Spring Boot @DataJpaTest

>> Spring Boot 2 REST APIs Integration Testing

>> Spring Boot 2 with JUnit 5 Testing Example

Spring Boot Annotations

>> Spring Boot @EnableAutoConfiguration Annotation with Example

>> Spring Boot @SpringBootApplication Annotation with Example

After reading above all Spring Boot articles, we can summarize the advantages of Spring boot as follows.

Advantages of Spring Boot

• It is very easy to develop Spring Based applications with Java.
• It reduces lots of development time and increases productivity.
• It avoids writing lots of boilerplate Code, Annotations and XML Configuration.
• It is very easy to integrate Spring Boot Application with its Spring Ecosystem like Spring JDBC, Spring ORM, Spring Data, Spring Security etc.
• It follows “Opinionated Defaults Configuration” Approach to reducing Developer effort
• It provides Embedded HTTP servers like Tomcat, Jetty etc. to develop and test our web applications very easily.
• It provides CLI (Command Line Interface) tool to develop and test Spring Boot(Java or Groovy) Applications from command prompt very easily and quickly.
• It provides lots of plugins to develop and test Spring Boot Applications very easily using Build Tools like Maven and Gradle
• It provides lots of plugins to work with embedded and in-memory Databases very easily.

References

• Spring Boot Reference Documentation
• https://start.spring.io/
• https://spring.io/projects/spring-boot