Spring Boot vs Spring MVC comparison

Spring Boot is a tool that makes developing web applications and microservices with the Java Spring Framework faster and easier, with minimal configuration and setup. By using Spring Boot, you avoid all the manual writing of boilerplate code, annotations, and complex XML configurations. Spring Boot integrates easily with other Spring products and can connect with multiple databases.

How Spring Boot improves Spring Framework

Java Spring Framework is a popular, open-source framework for creating standalone applications that run on the Java Virtual Machine.

Although the Spring Framework is powerful, it still takes significant time and knowledge to configure, set up, and deploy Spring applications. Spring Boot is designed to get developers up and running as quickly as possible, with minimal configuration of Spring Framework with three important capabilities.

• Autoconfiguration: Spring Boot applications are initialized with pre-set dependencies and don't have to be configured manually. Spring Boot also automatically configures both the underlying Spring Framework and any third-party packages based on your settings and on best practices, preventing future errors. Spring Boot's autoconfiguration feature enables you to start developing Spring applications quickly and efficiently. With Spring Boot, you reduce development time and increase the overall efficiency of the development process.
  
  
• Opinionated approach: Spring Boot uses its own judgment for adding and configuring starter packages for your application, depending on the requirements of your project. (These are defined by filling out a simple web-form during the initialization process.) Spring Boot chooses which dependencies to install and which default values to use according to the form’s values.
  
  
• Standalone applications: Spring Boot allows developers to create applications that can run on their own without relying on an external web server, by embedding a web server inside the application. Spring Boot applications can be launched on any platform simply by hitting the Run command.

Reviews from Real Users

Spring Boot stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its flexible integration options and its autoconfiguration feature, which allows users to start developing applications in a minimal amount of time.

A system analyst and team lead at a tech services company writes, “Spring Boot has a very lightweight framework, and you can develop projects within a short time. It's open-source and customizable. It's easy to control, has a very interesting deployment policy, and a very interesting testing policy. It's sophisticated. For data analysis and data mining, you can use a custom API and integrate your application. That's an advanced feature. For data managing and other things, you can get that custom from a third-party API. That is also a free license.”

Randy M., A CEO at Modal Technologies Corporation, writes, “I have found the starter solutions valuable, as well as integration with other products. Spring Security facilitates the handling of standard security measures. The Spring Boot annotations make it easy to handle routing for microservices and to access request and response objects. Other annotations included with Spring Boot enable move away from XML configuration.”

Spring MVC is a Java web framework built on the Servlet API and has been included in the Spring Framework from the very beginning.  It handles web applications that use server-rendered HTML user interface, REST APIs, and much more.  The documentation includes Spring MVC, View Technologies, CORS Support, and WebSocket Support. 

For baseline information and compatibility with Servlet container and Java EE version ranges please visit the Spring Framework Wiki.