Spring Boot Starter Web as Single Dependency

The application has a dependency on the library spring-boot-starter-web. This dependency integrates the Spring framework, the Spring web framework, and an environment for the processing of HTTP requests.

The default for the processing of the HTTP requests is a Tomcat server which runs embedded as part of the application.

Thus, the dependency on spring-boot-starter-web would be enough as a sole dependency for the application!

The dependency on spring-boot-starter-test is necessary for tests.

Note: The code for the test is not part of this course.

Spring cloud#

Spring Cloud is a collection of extensions for Spring Boot which are useful for cloud applications and for microservices.

Spring Cloud contains additional starters. To be able to use the Spring Cloud starters, an entry has to be inserted into the dependency-management section in the pom.xml for importing the information about the Spring Cloud starter.

The pom.xml files in the examples already contain the required import for this.

The Maven plugin#

The Maven plugin spring-boot-maven-plugin is necessary to build a Java JAR that starts an environment with the Tomcat server and the application.

mvn clean package

The above command deletes the old build results and builds a new JAR.

JAR is a Java file format which contains all the code for an application.

Maven gives this JAR file a name that is derived from the project name. It can be started with:

java -jar simplest-spring-boot-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar

Spring Boot can also generate WARs (web archives) which can be deployed on a Java web server like Tomcat or a Java application server.

                                                 Q U I Z  

In the next lesson, we’ll look at how Spring Boot fulfills the communication requirement.