Spring Boot

While the Spring Framework is incredibly powerful, setting up a new project traditionally required a significant amount of boilerplate configuration in XML files. Spring Boot is an opinionated extension of the Spring platform that radically simplifies this process. Its primary goal is to let developers get a new Spring application up and running as quickly as possible. Spring Boot achieves this through several key features. First, it provides 'starters', which are convenient dependency descriptors. For example, if you want to build a web application, you simply include the `spring-boot-starter-web` dependency, and Spring Boot will automatically bring in all the necessary libraries like Spring MVC and an embedded web server (like Tomcat). Second, Spring Boot features powerful autoconfiguration. It attempts to automatically configure your Spring application based on the JAR dependencies you have added. If it sees the web starter, it will automatically configure beans for a web application. If it sees a database starter, it will try to configure a data source. This 'convention over configuration' approach eliminates most of the manual setup. Third, Spring Boot applications are typically packaged as executable JAR files with an embedded server, which means you can run your entire web application from the command line with `java -jar myapp.jar`, without needing to deploy it to an external web server. This makes development, testing, and deployment significantly simpler.