Spring Boot

Preview

1. What are the core features and benefits of Spring Boot?
2. How does Spring Boot simplify the development of microservices architecture?
3. What are the steps involved in creating a Spring Boot application?
4. How does Spring Boot provide support for various databases and data sources?
5. How can Spring Boot be used for containerization and deployment?

Explain

Spring Boot is an open-source, microservices-based Java application framework that is used to develop standalone, production-grade applications. It is designed to simplify the process of building and deploying microservices-based applications by reducing the configuration overhead and providing a highly modular architecture to work with.

The key features of Spring Boot includes:

1. Auto-configuration: It automatically configures the application based on its dependencies.

2. Embedded server: It comes with an embedded web server, which allows deploying the application as a standalone server.

3. Spring CLI: It provides a command-line interface to manage the application.

4. Production-ready Actuator: It offers several tools to monitor and manage the application.

Here is an example of Spring Boot:

Let’s say you are building an e-commerce platform that includes a product catalog, a shopping cart, and a checkout process. You can use Spring Boot to build it as a set of microservices, each of which handles one of these tasks.

For example, you can build a product catalog microservice that allows users to browse and search for products. This microservice can be built using Spring Boot’s auto-configuration feature, along with the Spring MVC framework for web development. The embedded server provided by Spring Boot allows you to deploy the microservice as a standalone application.

Similarly, you can build other microservices for the shopping cart and checkout process, and then deploy them separately or combine them into a single application using Spring Boot’s modular architecture. This approach simplifies application development and makes it easy to manage and scale them.

Keypoint

1. Spring Boot is a framework that provides a set of tools and utilities for building web applications quickly and efficiently.
2. Spring Boot is designed to simplify the development process by providing a modular and auto-configurable approach to building applications.
3. Spring Boot utilizes Tomcat, Jetty, or Undertow as its embedded web server, which eliminates the need for standalone web servers.
4. Spring Boot is built on the Spring framework, which provides support for a wide range of functionality including dependency injection, MVC, data access, and more.
5. Spring Boot provides several built-in features, such as metrics gathering, health checking, and externalized configuration, that make it easier to build and maintain complex applications.
6. Spring Boot follows a “convention over configuration” approach, which means that developers don’t need to spend time setting up configuration files and can focus more on writing code.
7. Spring Boot enables developers to create standalone, production-ready applications that can be deployed directly to a cloud environment.
8. Spring Boot has a robust developer community and strong documentation, which makes it easier for developers to find support and answers to their questions.

Review

1. How do you configure a Spring Boot application to use a custom, non-default port?
   Answer:
   To set a custom port, add the following line to your application.properties or application.yml file: server.port=8081 (replace 8081 with your preferred port number)

2. What is the difference between @ComponentScan and @SpringBootApplication annotations?
   Answer:
   @ComponentScan is used to specify which package(s) should be scanned for Spring components (such as classes annotated with @Controller, @Repository, or @Service). @SpringBootApplication includes @ComponentScan and other auto-configuration annotations to specify the Spring Boot application as the root of all application context beans.

3. How can you access Spring Boot Actuator endpoints?
   Answer:
   Spring Boot Actuator endpoints are available at the /actuator URL path of your application. For example, http://localhost:8080/actuator/health or http://localhost:8080/actuator/info.

4. Can you create a custom error page for your Spring Boot application?
   Answer:
   Yes, you can create a custom error page by creating an HTML file named error.html (or error.whateverExtensionYouPrefer) in your src/main/resources/templates/ directory. This file will be used as the error page for all HTTP status codes.

5. What is the purpose of @EnableAutoConfiguration in Spring Boot?
   Answer:
   @EnableAutoConfiguration tells Spring Boot to automatically configure the Spring application context based on the classpath dependencies and other settings in the application.properties or application.yml files. This allows developers to focus on developing their business logic without having to worry about configuring the lower-level framework components.