7 Understanding Spring Boot and Spring
This chapter covers
- Implementing your first Spring web app
- Using Spring Boot in developing Spring apps
- Understanding the Spring MVC architecture
Now that you know all the needed Spring basics, let’s focus on web apps and how you use Spring to implement them. You can use all the Spring capabilities we’ve discussed to implement any kind of app. But often with Spring, the applications you implement are web apps.
Note
In part 1, we discussed the Spring context and aspects that are mandatory for understanding what comes next in the book (including what you’ll find in this chapter). If you jumped directly to this chapter, and you don’t know yet how to work with the Spring context and aspects, you might find our discussion difficult to understand. I strongly recommend you make sure you know the basics of using the framework before going further.
Spring makes web app development straightforward. We’ll start by discussing what web apps are and how they work. Then, to implement web apps, we’ll use Spring Boot. Spring Boot is a project in the Spring ecosystem that helps us create Spring applications faster by providing ready-to-use configuration and tools for running the app with less setup.
7.1 What is a web app?
I’m sure you use web apps daily. You probably just left a few tabs open in a web browser before starting to read this chapter. Maybe you don’t even read this book on paper and use the Manning liveBook web app for this.