1.4.2 Spring Boot

We’ve already seen many of the benefits of Spring Boot, including starter dependencies and autoconfiguration. Be certain that we’ll use as much of Spring Boot as possible throughout this book and avoid any form of explicit configuration, unless it’s absolutely necessary. But in addition to starter dependencies and autoconfiguration, Spring Boot also offers the following other useful features:

• The Actuator provides runtime insight into the inner workings of an application, including metrics, thread dump information, application health, and environment properties available to the application.
• Flexible specification of environment properties.
• Additional testing support on top of the testing assistance found in the core framework.

What’s more, Spring Boot offers an alternative programming model based on Groovy scripts that’s called the Spring Boot CLI (command-line interface). With the Spring Boot CLI, you can write entire applications as a collection of Groovy scripts and run them from the command line. We won’t spend much time with the Spring Boot CLI, but we’ll touch on it on occasion when it fits our needs.

Spring Boot has become such an integral part of Spring development that I can’t imagine developing a Spring application without it. Consequently, this book takes a Spring Boot–centric view, and you might catch me using the word Spring when I’m referring to something that Spring Boot is doing.