I've found quite a huge pile of topics that give the answer for the opposite question: "Why choose Spring Boot over Spring?", but I guess somebody can give an example that will justify Spring selection over Spring Boot.
You can found several cons on Spring boot over Spring, mainly missing learning steps in Spring and support and if using monolithic application
If you are new to Spring and want to learn how the dependency injection, AOP programming, and proxies work, starting with Spring Boot is not a good choice. Spring Boot hides the most of these details from you.
If you are not familiarized with other projects of the Spring ecosystem (Spring Integration, Spring AMQP, Spring Security, etc), using them from Spring Boot will make you miss a lot of concepts
In a large and monolithic based applications, I wouldn’t encourage you to use Spring Boot
Also can increase deployment size
Spring boot may unnecessarily increase the deployment binary size with unused dependencies.
Related
I have a set of projects in Spring framework and I have to Find the ones which can be converted to Spring boot.
Is there anything that is related to Spring framework and cannot be converted to spring boot ? In my research, I Could not Find something like that.
But does anyone know something, like a dependency, which would force the project to stay in Spring framework ?
Spring Boot uses the Spring Framework as a foundation and improvises on it. It simplifies Spring dependencies and runs applications straight from a command line. Spring Boot provides several features to help manage enterprise applications easily. Spring Boot is not a replacement for the Spring, but it’s a tool for working faster and easier on Spring applications. It simplifies much of the architecture by adding a layer that helps automate configuration and deployment while making it easier to add new features.
Most of the changes for migrating Spring Framework application to Spring Boot are related to configurations.This migration will have minimal impact on the application code or other custom components.Spring Boot brings a number of advantages to the development.
It simplifies Spring dependencies by taking the opinionated view.
Spring Boot provides a preconfigured set of technologies/framework to reduces error-prone configuration so we as a developer focused on building our business logic and not thinking of project setup.
You really don’t need those big XML configurations for your project.
Embed Tomcat, Jetty or Undertow directly.
Provide opinionated Maven POM to simplify your configurations.
Application metrics and health check using actuator module.
Externalization of the configuration files.
Good to refer this for migrating from Spring to Spring Boot application: https://www.javadevjournal.com/spring-boot/migrating-from-spring-to-spring-boot/
As part of a new web application project, I'm planning to learn Spring. I started to read through the Spring framework reference. While I was googling, I came across Spring boot. What I understood is that spring boot helps to build application much faster than spring by reducing configuration. Now I'm little confused whether should I continue learning spring or jump to spring boot. My intention is to understand how spring works as a framework rather than a few features. So please let me know, as a beginner what should I do? First, learn Spring and then spring boot or vice-versa.
Update
Ok, I know it's a while since I asked this question. I kind of have an answer (personal one)
I started with Spring Boot and so far built one Spring Boot REST application. Yes, as others said, Spring Boot, helps you to get started quickly and being new to some language/technology, I would love to see a working module ASAP. So Spring boot helps you with that.
Later depending on your interest, you can start exploring in-depth how Spring boot does that magic.
So, in summary, go with Spring Boot and then deep dive to understand the underlying concept. Again this is my opinion.
Thanks, everyone for your inputs/suggestions.
If you want to develop web applications especially micro-services, I will recommend that you should learn Spring Boot first.
The first reason is that there are many resources and examples on
web, so you can easily find what you need.
The second reason is that Spring Framework (including Spring Boot) is
suitable for PaaS environment especially Pivotal. Therefore you can
rapidly deploy your applications without too much effort.
First of all, learn how Spring applications work.
Spring applications are based on the Object Relation Model. You need to understand the annotations and why we use them. Then you have to learn how Spring MVC works. Up to here, both Spring and Spring Boot are similar. Basically, Spring Boot is made so that a Spring-based application can be made very easily. Spring Boot is very good framework for the Web and other.
After learning the above things, then you can jump easily onto Spring Boot. However, if you jump directly to Spring Boot you will see there are many such things which are not described in the Spring Boot tutorials, since many of them expect that you have some prior knowledge of Spring.
I have a requirement that I have to use Spring Boot with JSF as user interface, as of now I am using JSF with spring other modules. So, I want know the similarities, differences and advantages of Spring boot over Spring other modules.
Long story short, Spring Boot is highly opinionated wrapper for Spring Framework with a lot of production and cloud ready features. It can significantly reduce amount of your configuration if you follow conventions.
Start reading here.
You can not compare spring boot and spring framework. Spring Boot is a new project aims to help spring development by auto configuration of things required to run the spring application.
So, if you have spring application, you can use spring boot to run your Spring application without worrying about writing the XML configuration.
There are many people who advised me to use Spring Boot instead of Spring to develop REST web services.
I want to know what exactly the difference between the two is?
In short
Spring Boot reduces the need to write a lot of configuration and boilerplate code.
It has an opinionated view on Spring Platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with minimum effort.
Easy to create standalone applications with embedded Tomcat/Jetty/Undertow.
Provides metrics, health checks, and externalized configuration.
You can read more here http://projects.spring.io/spring-boot/
Unfortunately and I mean this out of personal frustration with Spring boot, I have yet to see any real quantified list, where the differences are explicitly outlined.
There is only qualifications such as the rubbish sentence "...opinionated view..." which are bandied about.
What is clear, is that SpringBoot has wrapped up groups of Spring annotations into its own set of annotations, implicitly.
Further obfuscating, and making the need for anyone starting out in SpringBoot to have to commit to memory what a particular SpringBoot annotation represents.
My reply therefore is of no quantifiable benefit to the original question, which is analogous to that of the SpringBoot authors.
Those behind Spring IMO deliberately set-out to obfuscate, which reflects the obtuseness of their JavaDoc and API's (see SpringBatch API's as an example, if you think I am flaming) that makes one wonder the value of their open-source ethos.
My quest for figuring out SpringBoot continues.
Update. 22-08-2022
Read this (https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/reference/html/using.html#using.auto-configuration) and you will figure out for yourself what "opinionated" means.
There are over 140 Config classes that Springboot can use for this opinionated view, depending on what is on your classpath.
yes, on your classpath.
Finally and bizzarely, the annotation #SpringBootApplication is a configuration annotation as it includes it.
Go figure :=)
Basically, Spring Boot is an opinionated instance of a Spring application.
Spring Boot is a rapid application development platform. It uses various components of Spring, but has additional niceties like the ability to package your application as a runnable jar, which includes an embedded tomcat (or jetty) server. Additionally, Spring Boot contains a LOT of auto-configuration for you (the opinionated part), where it will pick and choose what to create based on what classes/beans are available or missing.
I would echo their sentiment that if you are going to use Spring I can't think of any reasons to do it without Spring Boot.
Spring Boot is opinionated view of Spring Framework projects.Let's analyse it through one program taken from Spring Boot Documentation.
#RestController
#EnableAutoConfiguration
public class Example {
#RequestMapping("/")
String home() {
return "Hello World!";
}
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
SpringApplication.run(Example.class, args);
}
}
It's a very basic REST API and you need to add Spring-boot-starter-web in your POM.xml for the same. Since you have added starter-web dependency, the annotation
#EnableAutoConfiguration guesses that you want to develop a web application and sets up Spring accordingly.
Spring Boot auto-configuration attempts to automatically configure your Spring application based on the jar dependencies that you have added. For example, if HSQLDB is on your classpath, and you have not manually configured any database connection beans, then Spring Boot auto-configures an in-memory database.
It's opinionated like maven. Maven creates a project structure for you which it thinks is the general pattern of projects like it adds src/main/java folder or resource folder for you.
Spring boot helps in faster development. It has many starter projects that helps you get going quite faster. It also includes many non functional features like: embedded servers, security, metrics, health checks etc. In short, it makes, spring based application development easier with minimally invading code(Less configuration files, less no of annotations).
Reference: https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current-SNAPSHOT/reference/htmlsingle/#boot-documentation-about
For developing common Spring applications or starting to learn Spring, I think using Spring Boot would be recommended. It considerably eases the job, is production ready and is rapidly being widely adopted.
Spring Boot is supposedly opinionated, i.e. it heavily advocates a certain style of rapid development, but it is designed well enough to accommodate exceptions to the rule, if you will. In short, it is a convention over configuration methodology that is willing to understand your need to break convention when warranted
For Spring Framework, you need to configure your project using XML configuration or Java configuration.
But for Spring Boot, these are preconfigured according to Spring team's view for rapid development. That is why Spring Boot is said to be an "opinionated view" of Spring Framework. It follows Convention over Configuration design paradigm.
Note: These configurations include view resolvers for MVC, transaction managers, way of locating container managed beans (Spring beans) and many more. And of course you can override any of these preconfigurations according to your need.
Spring Boot supports embedded servlet containers like Tomcat, Jetty or Undertow to create standalone applications, which Spring Framework doesn't.
Spring eliminate boilerplate code.
Spring-boot eliminates boilerplate configurations.
more
Ive been working now with the Spring Framework 3.0.5 and Spring Security 3.0.5 for several time. I know that Spring Framework uses DI and AOP. I also know that Spring Security uses DI, for example when writing custom handlers or filters. Im not sure whether Spring Security also uses AOP - so my first question is: does it?
Well, Id also like to know how Spring Security can be used for non-spring-based applications. Its written in their documentation that this is possible. Well, I wonder how - it seems like it uses DI, so how should it work in a simple java web application? I guess at least a web container which supports dependency injection is needed, correct? (Which one could that be?)
Thank you for answering :-)
[EDIT]
documentation says:
"documentation says: "Spring Security provides comprehensive security services for J2EE-based enterprise software applications. There is a particular emphasis on supporting projects built using The Spring Framework, which is the leading J2EE solution for enterprise software development. If you're not using Spring for developing enterprise applications, we warmly encourage you to take a closer look at it. Some familiarity with Spring - and in particular dependency injection principles - will help you get up to speed with Spring Security more easily.""
j2ee-based enterprise software applications......... emphasis on supporting projects using spring framework...... well this means it should be possible to work with it without Spring Framework itself!
?
AND:
Even though we use Spring to configure Spring Seurity, your application doesn't have to be Spring-based. Many people use Spring Security with web frameworks such as Struts, for example.
This is from the spring security homepage. well....
Does it use AOP ?
Yes spring-security uses AOP for its method security (you'd have to search the page to find it).
Can you use spring-security without spring ?
Generally no.
As you need to define spring beans for several spring-security elements.
But! You can use Acegi security without spring as far as I know. Which should give you close to the same functionality.
Can you secure a non-J2EE application
Definitely.
Anything that can run in a servlet container can be secured with spring-security. You just need Spring's IoC/DI.
This answer can help you on the minimal spring-security dependencies.