Spring Introduction -1

Spring Boot

Spring Boot is designed to get you up and running as quickly as possible, with minimal upfront configuration of Spring. Spring Boot takes an opinionated view of building production-ready applications.

Spring Boot is the starting point for building all Spring-based applications. Spring Boot is designed to get you up and running as quickly as possible, with minimal upfront configuration of Spring.

Spring Boot 2.0

Installation of Spring Boot

1. Gradle installation
   Spring Boot is compatible with Gradle 4.4 and later. If you do not already have Gradle installed, you can follow the instructions at gradle.org.

Spring Boot dependencies can be declared by using the org.springframework.boot group. Typically, your project declares dependencies to one or more “Starters”. Spring Boot provides a useful Gradle plugin that can be used to simplify dependency declarations and to create executable jars.

2. Installing the Spring Boot CLI
   The Spring Boot CLI (Command Line Interface) is a command line tool that you can use to quickly prototype with Spring. It lets you run Groovy scripts, which means that you have a familiar Java-like syntax without so much boilerplate code.

You do not need to use the CLI to work with Spring Boot, but it is definitely the quickest way to get a Spring application off the ground.

You can download the Spring CLI distribution from the Spring software repository:

spring-boot-cli-2.1.4.RELEASE-bin.zip
spring-boot-cli-2.1.4.RELEASE-bin.tar.gz
Cutting edge snapshot distributions are also available.

Once downloaded, follow the INSTALL.txt instructions from the unpacked archive. In summary, there is a spring script (spring.bat for Windows) in a bin/ directory in the .zip file. Alternatively, you can use java -jar with the .jar file (the script helps you to be sure that the classpath is set correctly).

Developing Your First Spring Boot Application

This section describes how to develop a simple “Hello World!” web application that highlights some of Spring Boot’s key features. We use Maven to build this project, since most IDEs support it.

1. Before we begin, open a terminal and run the following commands to ensure that you have valid versions of Java and Maven installed:

$ java -version
java version "1.8.0_102"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_102-b14)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.102-b14, mixed mode)

$ mvn -v
Apache Maven 3.5.4 (1edded0938998edf8bf061f1ceb3cfdeccf443fe; 2018-06-17T14:33:14-04:00)
Maven home: /usr/local/Cellar/maven/3.3.9/libexec
Java version: 1.8.0_102, vendor: Oracle Corporation

2. Creating the POM

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
	xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 https://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
	<modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>

	<groupId>com.example</groupId>
	<artifactId>myproject</artifactId>
	<version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>

	<parent>
		<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
		<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
		<version>2.1.4.RELEASE</version>
	</parent>

	<!-- Additional lines to be added here... -->

</project>

3. Adding Classpath Dependencies
   Spring Boot provides a number of “Starters” that let you add jars to your classpath. Our sample application has already used spring-boot-starter-parent in the parent section of the POM. The spring-boot-starter-parent is a special starter that provides useful Maven defaults. It also provides a dependency-management section so that you can omit version tags for “blessed” dependencies.

Other “Starters” provide dependencies that you are likely to need when developing a specific type of application. Since we are developing a web application, we add a spring-boot-starter-web dependency. Before that, we can look at what we currently have by running the following command:

$ mvn dependency:tree

[INFO] com.example:myproject:jar:0.0.1-SNAPSHOT

The mvn dependency:tree command prints a tree representation of your project dependencies. You can see that spring-boot-starter-parent provides no dependencies by itself. To add the necessary dependencies, edit your pom.xml and add the spring-boot-starter-web dependency immediately below the parent section:

<dependencies>
	<dependency>
		<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
		<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
	</dependency>
</dependencies>

4. Writing the Code
   To finish our application, we need to create a single Java file. By default, Maven compiles sources from src/main/java, so you need to create that folder structure and then add a file named src/main/java/Example.java to contain the following code:

import org.springframework.boot.*;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.*;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.*;

@RestController
@EnableAutoConfiguration
public class Example {

	@RequestMapping("/")
	String home() {
		return "Hello World!";
	}

	public static void main(String[] args) {
		SpringApplication.run(Example.class, args);
	}

}