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This guide provides a sampling of how Spring Boot helps you accelerate and facilitate application development. As you read more Spring Getting Started guides, you will see more use cases for Spring Boot. It is meant to give you a quick taste of Spring Boot. If you want to create your own Spring Boot-based project, visit Spring Initializr, fill in your project details, pick your options, and you can download either a Maven build file, or a bundled up project as a zip file.
You’ll build a simple web application with Spring Boot and add some useful services to it.
build.gradle
link:initial/build.gradle[role=include]
Spring Boot offers a fast way to build applications. It looks at your classpath and at beans you have configured, makes reasonable assumptions about what you’re missing, and adds it. With Spring Boot you can focus more on business features and less on infrastructure.
For example:
-
Got Spring MVC? There are several specific beans you almost always need, and Spring Boot adds them automatically. A Spring MVC app also needs a servlet container, so Spring Boot automatically configures embedded Tomcat.
-
Got Jetty? If so, you probably do NOT want Tomcat, but instead embedded Jetty. Spring Boot handles that for you.
-
Got Thymeleaf? There are a few beans that must always be added to your application context; Spring Boot adds them for you.
These are just a few examples of the automatic configuration Spring Boot provides. At the same time, Spring Boot doesn’t get in your way. For example, if Thymeleaf is on your path, Spring Boot adds a SpringTemplateEngine
to your application context automatically. But if you define your own SpringTemplateEngine
with your own settings, then Spring Boot won’t add one. This leaves you in control with little effort on your part.
Note
|
Spring Boot doesn’t generate code or make edits to your files. Instead, when you start up your application, Spring Boot dynamically wires up beans and settings and applies them to your application context. |
Now you can create a web controller for a simple web application.
src/main/java/hello/HelloController.java
link:initial/src/main/java/hello/HelloController.java[role=include]
The class is flagged as a @RestController
, meaning it’s ready for use by Spring MVC to handle web requests. @RequestMapping
maps /
to the index()
method. When invoked from a browser or using curl on the command line, the method returns pure text. That’s because @RestController
combines @Controller
and @ResponseBody
, two annotations that results in web requests returning data rather than a view.
Here you create an Application
class with the components:
src/main/java/hello/Application.java
link:initial/src/main/java/hello/Application.java[role=include]
-
@Configuration
tags the class as a source of bean definitions for the application context. -
@EnableAutoConfiguration
tells Spring Boot to start adding beans based on classpath settings, other beans, and various property settings. -
Normally you would add
@EnableWebMvc
for a Spring MVC app, but Spring Boot adds it automatically when it sees spring-webmvc on the classpath. This flags the application as a web application and activates key behaviors such as setting up aDispatcherServlet
. -
@ComponentScan
tells Spring to look for other components, configurations, and services in the thehello
package, allowing it to find theHelloController
.
The main()
method uses Spring Boot’s SpringApplication.run()
method to launch an application. Did you notice that there wasn’t a single line of XML? No web.xml file either. This web application is 100% pure Java and you didn’t have to deal with configuring any plumbing or infrastructure.
The run()
method returns an ApplicationContext
and this application then retrieves all the beans that were created either by your app or were automatically added thanks to Spring Boot. It sorts them and prints them out.
To run the application, execute:
./gradlew build && java -jar build/libs/gs-spring-boot-0.1.0.jar
If you are using Maven, execute:
mvn package && java -jar target/gs-spring-boot-0.1.0.jar
You should see some output like this:
Let's inspect the beans provided by Spring Boot: application beanNameHandlerMapping defaultServletHandlerMapping dispatcherServlet embeddedServletContainerCustomizerBeanPostProcessor handlerExceptionResolver helloController httpRequestHandlerAdapter messageSource mvcContentNegotiationManager mvcConversionService mvcValidator org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.MessageSourceAutoConfiguration org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.PropertyPlaceholderAutoConfiguration org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.web.EmbeddedServletContainerAutoConfiguration org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.web.EmbeddedServletContainerAutoConfiguration$DispatcherServletConfiguration org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.web.EmbeddedServletContainerAutoConfiguration$EmbeddedTomcat org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.web.ServerPropertiesAutoConfiguration org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.properties.ServerProperties org.springframework.context.annotation.ConfigurationClassPostProcessor.enhancedConfigurationProcessor org.springframework.context.annotation.ConfigurationClassPostProcessor.importAwareProcessor org.springframework.context.annotation.internalAutowiredAnnotationProcessor org.springframework.context.annotation.internalCommonAnnotationProcessor org.springframework.context.annotation.internalConfigurationAnnotationProcessor org.springframework.context.annotation.internalRequiredAnnotationProcessor org.springframework.web.servlet.config.annotation.DelegatingWebMvcConfiguration propertySourcesBinder propertySourcesPlaceholderConfigurer requestMappingHandlerAdapter requestMappingHandlerMapping resourceHandlerMapping simpleControllerHandlerAdapter tomcatEmbeddedServletContainerFactory viewControllerHandlerMapping
You can clearly see org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure beans. There is also a tomcatEmbeddedServletContainerFactory
.
Check out the service.
$ curl localhost:8080 Greetings from Spring Boot!
If you are building a web site for your business, you probably need to add some management services. Spring Boot provides several out of the box with its actuator module, such as health, audits, beans, and more.
Add this to your build file’s list of dependencies:
link:complete/build.gradle[role=include]
If you are using Maven, add this to your list of dependencies:
link:complete/pom.xml[role=include]
Then restart the app:
./gradlew build && java -jar build/libs/gs-spring-boot-0.1.0.jar
If you are using Maven, execute:
mvn package && java -jar target/gs-spring-boot-0.1.0.jar
You will see a new set of RESTful end points added to the application. These are management services provided by Spring Boot.
2013-08-01 08:03:42.592 INFO 43851 ... Mapped "{[/error],methods=[],params=[],headers=[],consumes=[],produces=[],custom=[]}" onto public java.util.Map<java.lang.String, java.lang.Object> org.springframework.boot.ops.web.BasicErrorController.error(javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest) 2013-08-01 08:03:42.592 INFO 43851 ... Mapped "{[/error],methods=[],params=[],headers=[],consumes=[],produces=[text/html],custom=[]}" onto public org.springframework.web.servlet.ModelAndView org.springframework.boot.ops.web.BasicErrorController.errorHtml(javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest) 2013-08-01 08:03:42.844 INFO 43851 ... Mapped URL path [/env] onto handler of type [class org.springframework.boot.ops.endpoint.EnvironmentEndpoint] 2013-08-01 08:03:42.844 INFO 43851 ... Mapped URL path [/health] onto handler of type [class org.springframework.boot.ops.endpoint.HealthEndpoint] 2013-08-01 08:03:42.844 INFO 43851 ... Mapped URL path [/beans] onto handler of type [class org.springframework.boot.ops.endpoint.BeansEndpoint] 2013-08-01 08:03:42.844 INFO 43851 ... Mapped URL path [/info] onto handler of type [class org.springframework.boot.ops.endpoint.InfoEndpoint] 2013-08-01 08:03:42.845 INFO 43851 ... Mapped URL path [/metrics] onto handler of type [class org.springframework.boot.ops.endpoint.MetricsEndpoint] 2013-08-01 08:03:42.845 INFO 43851 ... Mapped URL path [/trace] onto handler of type [class org.springframework.boot.ops.endpoint.TraceEndpoint] 2013-08-01 08:03:42.845 INFO 43851 ... Mapped URL path [/dump] onto handler of type [class org.springframework.boot.ops.endpoint.DumpEndpoint] 2013-08-01 08:03:42.845 INFO 43851 ... Mapped URL path [/shutdown] onto handler of type [class org.springframework.boot.ops.endpoint.ShutdownEndpoint]
It’s easy to check the health of the app.
$ curl localhost:8080/health ok
You can invoke shutdown through curl.
$ curl -X POST localhost:8080/shutdown
The response shows that shutdown through REST is currently disabled by default:
{"message":"Shutdown not enabled, sorry."}
Whew! You probably don’t want that until you are ready to turn on proper security settings, if at all.
For more details about each of these REST points and how you can tune their settings with an application.properties
file, check out the Spring Boot project.
You have seen some of Spring Boot’s starters. You can see them all here.
The last example showed how Spring Boot makes it easy to wire beans you may not be aware that you need. And it showed how to turn on convenient management services.
But Spring Boot does yet more. It supports not only traditional WAR file deployments, but also makes it easy to put together executable JARs thanks to Spring Boot’s loader module. The various guides demonstrate this dual support through the spring-boot-gradle-plugin
and spring-boot-maven-plugin
.
On top of that, Spring Boot also has Groovy support, allowing you to build Spring MVC web apps with as little as a single file.
Create a new file called app.groovy and put the following code in it:
@RestController
class ThisWillActuallyRun {
@RequestMapping("/")
String home() {
return "Hello World!"
}
}
Note
|
It doesn’t matter where the file is. You can even fit an application that small inside a single tweet! |
Next, install Spring Boot’s CLI.
Run it as follows:
$ spring run app.groovy
Note
|
This assumes you shut down the previous application, to avoid a port collision. |
From a different terminal window:
$ curl localhost:8080 Hello World!
Spring Boot does this by dynamically adding key annotations to your code and leveraging Groovy Grapes to pull down needed libraries to make the app run.
Congratulations! You built a simple web application with Spring Boot and learned how it can ramp up your development pace. You also turned on some handy production services. This is only a small sampling of what Spring Boot can do. Checkout Spring Boot’s README if you want to dig deeper.