Spring The Big Picture

What is Spring?

• Referring to the Spring Ecosystem.
• Spring Framework.
  • The Spring Framework is made up of these modules show in the image below:

* Then lead to creation of other _Spring projects_ such as _Spring Data, Spring Social, Spring Integration etc..._

• Although these were great projects, creating an application in Spring was very difficult.
• This is when Spring Boot came in as it made it easy to create Spring base applications quickly and easily.
• After Spring Boot, came Spring Cloud which was built on top of Spring Boot and was created to simplify and use cloud patterns in building Spring Application using pattern such as Service Discovery and Distributed Configuration.
• The Spring Cloud project was mainly aimed at Distributed Applications e.g. Microservice Applications.

Why Spring?

• Creating software is hard but Spring makes it easier to create Java Enterprise Applications.
• Backwards compatible.
• Large and active community.
• Continually innovates and evolves.

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Spring Boot Makes Spring Both Quick and Easy

• Learning any new technology can be hard, confusing and frustrating.
• Thankfully Spring Boot makes learning Spring both quick and easy.
• Don't confuse Easy with Lack of Features. Spring Boot is fully featured and used on a ton of systems in production today.

Understanding Spring Boot's Key Features

Auto-Configuration

• Spring Boot will automatically configure and setup an application based on its surrounding as well as hints provided by the developer.

Standalone

• You don't need to deploy your application to a web-server or anything of that sort to get to run. You literally just run the application with just one command just like you would with any other application.

Opinionated

• Spring Boot has a chosen way of doing things by default.

Spring Boot Auto-Configuration

• Attempts to automatically configure your Spring application based on the dependencies that you have added.
• Setting up auto-configuration is effortless. The developer only needs to add an annotation to their application as below:

    @EnableAutoConfiguration
    public class DemoApplication {
        ...
    }

• Configurations are easy to enable or disable.