Key Differences Between Spring Boot and Spring Framework

Category: Technology

This article will talk about the vital concepts that every Java developer should know. In the subsequent sections, the answers to questions like – What is Spring Framework, what is Spring Boot, and Differences between Spring Framework and Spring Boot will be answered. By the end of this article, readers will be able to have a better understanding of the above-mentioned topics and answer their most frequently asked questions. What is Spring Framework? Spring Framework is a widely utilized Java framework for building applications. By leveraging the benefits associated with Spring Framework, developers can develop stand-alone applications, web applications, distributed applications, and much more. This framework strives to simply Java Enterprise Edition development, further enabling developers to be more productive. In other words, Spring Framework offers several features to the developers so that they can complete more work in less time. The primary feature of the Spring Framework is dependency injection. Dependency injection is nothing but the process of injecting dependent objects into target objects. For instance, if the controller class wants to talk to the service class method, the service class object will be injected into the controller class. Instead of the programmer injecting dependent objects into the target object, Spring Framework will operate for us. This is one of the vital features of Spring Framework. What is Spring Boot? I would be incorrect if I say Spring Boot is a separate framework because Spring Boot is an enhancement of the existing Spring framework. In other words, Spring Boot is another approach to developing Spring-based applications with minimal configurations. In this approach, developers can develop the same type of applications they could with the Spring framework, however, with a distinct and unique approach. In the Spring framework, the programmer had to take care of a lot of configurations. Whereas, in Spring Boot these configurations are reduced. Spring Boot is mainly used to develop Rest APIs. The primary feature of Spring Boot is auto-configuration. It automatically configures the classes based on the requirement. Spring Boot also offers embedded servers such as Jetty and Tomcat, further encouraging serverless development. Now, it must be clear that web applications can be developed utilizing both Spring Framework and Spring Boot. In the following section, let us know what are the main differences between the two. Differences between Spring Framework and Spring Boot Use cases Spring Framework is an open-source lightweight framework that is widely used to develop business applications. Whereas, Spring Boot is an extension of the Spring framework and is widely used for developing Rest APIs. Applications made in the Spring framework are loosely coupled. Spring Boot on the other hand creates stand-alone applications. HTTP Basic Authentication In the case of Spring Framework, the standard spring-security framework and spring-security-configuration dependencies are required to enable the default HTTP Basic authentication in an application. The next step involves enabling the @EnableWebSecurity annotation by adding a class that has the WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter. To enable security, one must use in-memory authentication. Just like the Spring framework, these dependencies must be included even in the case of Spring Boot. However, this can be done by defining only the spring boot starter security dependency which will automatically take care of the rest. Number of Dependencies Spring Framework requires a specified number of dependencies while creating web apps. However, Spring Boot can hit the ground running with just one dependency. There are several more dependencies that are required during build time that is added to the final archive by default. During the testing process, Spring Framework adds dependencies like- Mockito, Spring Test, Hamcrest, and JUnit. Spring Boot has several starter projects that are dedicated to various Spring modules. It is fully equipped with the necessary libraries which are needed by each module. Hence, unlike the Spring framework, Spring Boot needs only one starter dependency in testing libraries.