Spring Boot provides a good platform for Java developers to develop a stand-alone and production-grade spring application that you can just run. You can get started with minimum configurations without the need for an entire Spring configuration setup.

Advantages

Spring Boot offers the following advantages to its developers −

- Easy to understand and develop spring applications
- Increases productivity
- Reduces the development time

Goals

Spring Boot is designed with the following goals −

- To avoid complex XML configuration in Spring
- To develop a production ready Spring applications in an easier way
- To reduce the development time and run the application independently
- Offer an easier way of getting started with the application

Why Spring Boot?

You can choose Spring Boot because of the features and benefits it offers as given here −

- It provides a flexible way to configure Java Beans, XML configurations, and Database Transactions.
- It provides a powerful batch processing and manages REST endpoints.
- In Spring Boot, everything is auto configured; no manual configurations are needed.
- It offers annotation-based spring application
- Eases dependency management
- It includes Embedded Servlet Container

How does it work?

Spring Boot automatically configures your application based on the dependencies you have added to the project by using @EnableAutoConfiguration annotation. For example, if MySQL database is on your classpath, but you have not configured any database connection, then Spring Boot auto-configures an in-memory database.

The entry point of the spring boot application is the class contains @SpringBootApplication annotation and the main method.

Spring Boot automatically scans all the components included in the project by using @ComponentScan annotation.