Maven Spring boot dependency vs Maven Spring dependency - spring

Question

What is the difference between the way I declare the two dependency?
My project is a spring boot project...
This one I downloaded from Spring Initializer:
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-data-ldap</artifactId>
</dependency>
This one is from mvnrepository.com:
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.security</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-security-ldap</artifactId>
<version>3.1.0.RELEASE</version>
</dependency>
Update, this article shows a third way:
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.ldap</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-ldap-core</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.security</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-security-ldap</artifactId>
</dependency>

Answer 1

The first one is a Spring Boot starter. According to the documentation:
Starters are a set of convenient dependency descriptors that you can include in your application. You get a one-stop shop for all the Spring and related technologies that you need without having to hunt through sample code and copy-paste loads of dependency descriptors.
The pom.xml of spring-boot-starter-data-ldap contains the following dependency definitions:
<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.data</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-data-ldap</artifactId>
<exclusions>
<exclusion>
<groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
<artifactId>jcl-over-slf4j</artifactId>
</exclusion>
</exclusions>
</dependency>
</dependencies>
The second one: spring-security-ldap is the artifact present in maven central, corresponding to the Spring LDAP project.