spring-boot-starter-parent: Can this be included as dependency - spring

Question

I was understanding something in spring boot and to being with, used a very simple snippet, like adding this in pom.xml
<parent>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
<version>2.2.1.RELEASE</version>
</parent>
As I understand <parent> in this context means that in my pom.xml, there we have a parent pom.xml (saw the pom.xml file for spring-boot-starter-parent) which will have list of dependencies.
The important thing is that it is only pom packaging, and NOT a real jar / binary (please correct if I am wrong)
I saw the following in mvn repository:
<!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.springframework.boot/spring-boot-starter-parent -->
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
<version>2.2.1.RELEASE</version>
<type>pom</type>
</dependency>
My doubt is:
How can we include it as an dependency , it is just a pom packaging (and not a real jar / war), which acts as central place which holds common dependencies? Is it allowed? I tried adding in my project, but saw errors in STS IDE.
How does this get downloaded? Can we see the contents of this "parent"

Answer 1

First off, you've probably missed the meaning of parent pom in this case.
Spring boot of any specific version (2.2.1 in this case) comes with a bunch of possible integrations with many technologies / libraries. So it provides "default" versions of the libraries to work with because its very hard to check that it compatible with all possible versions of all libraries. You can of course provide your own version but then you should test a compatibility as an application maintainer.
So If you'll checkout the source code of spring-boot-starter-parent pom, you'll see that it provides some plugins and plugin management and more importantly inherits from another pom called spring-boot-dependencies
Note it doesn't add any dependencies to your project. It only defines a dependencyManagement section. This means that once you'll use the dependency in your project (that inherits) from this pom, you don't have to specify a version, only group id and artifact id.
Again, that's because spring boot offers by default very specific versions of thirdparties - the version that it was verified that it's compatible with...
Now as for the second part of the question - indeed it doesn't make sense to include dependency with packaging pom like you've posted, could you please provide a link where exactly you've seen this?
Sometimes when people adopt spring boot in their projects they already have have some parent, so they can't use the inheritance, in this case they can use a very special maven scope "import" and use the dependency on pom treating it as BOM (bill of materials) - frankly a pretty advanced stuff in maven. But spring boot uses this feature for these cases.
The dependency inclusion looks like this:
<dependencies>
...
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-dependencies</artifactId>
<version>2.2.1.RELEASE</version>
<type>pom</type>
<scope>import</scope>
</dependency>
</dependencies>
Note, the `import line. From maven's site: This is meant to allow dependency management information such as versions and excludes be retrieved from a remote POM file.
Here is a tutorial about this topic

Answer 2

#CuriousMind, including the spring-boot-starter-parent as a dependency is like trying to instantiate an interface or Abstract Class in Java. As you noticed, its packaging is pom, meaning it is just a maven artifact to help configure your maven project. Jar and War will contain some java binaries. I think the MVN repository code automatically generate all sample as dependencies..