You’re freed from the burden of worry about library versions. You can trust that for a given version of Spring Boot, the versions of the libraries brought in transitively will be compatible. You only need to worry about which version of Spring Boot you’re using. Every single release of Spring, Spring Boot, and all of the other projects in the Spring ecosystem unleashes some new amazing capabilities that rekindle the fun in developing applications. With Spring reaching a significant milestone with its 5.0 release and Spring Boot releasing version 2.0, there’s so much more Spring to enjoy that it was a no-brainer to write another edition of Spring in Action. You may also notice that all three dependencies have the word starter in their artifact ID. Spring Boot starter dependencies are special in that they typically don’t have any library code themselves, but instead transitively pull in other libraries. These starter dependencies offer three primary benefits: Chapter 5 reveals how to configure a Spring application using Spring Boot configuration properties. You’ll also learn how to selectively apply configuration using profiles.

The book has 5 parts spanning 19 chapters. Part 1 covers the foundational topics of building Spring applications: Next, take note of the element and, more specifically, its child. This specifies that your project has spring-boot-starter-parent as its parent POM. Among other things, this parent POM provides dependency management for several libraries commonly used in Spring projects. For those libraries covered by the parent POM, you won’t have to specify a version, as it’s inherited from the parent. The version, 2.0.4.RELEASE, indicates that you’re using Spring Boot 2.0.4 and, thus, will inherit dependency management as defined by that version of Spring Boot. It produces a manifest file in the JAR file that denotes the bootstrap class (TacoCloudApplication, in your case) as the main class for the executable JAR.

about the authors

TacoCloudApplication.java—This is the Spring Boot main class that bootstraps the project. We’ll take a closer look at this class in a moment.

Spring Framework makes life easier for Java developers. New features in Spring 5 bring its productivity-focused approach to microservices, reactive development, and other modern application designs. With Spring Boot now fully integrated, you can start even complex projects with minimal configuration code. And the upgraded WebFlux framework supports reactive apps right out of the box! Automatic configuration has its roots in the Spring techniques known as autowiring and component scanning. With component scanning, Spring can automatically discover components from an application’s classpath and create them as beans in the Spring application context. With autowiring, Spring automatically injects the components with the other beans that they depend on. Chapter 10 introduces Project Reactor, the reactive programming library that underpins Spring 5’s reactive features. After ten years, this is still the clearest and most comprehensive introduction to the core concepts of the Spring platform. Chapter 14 shows how to centralize application configuration in a configuration server that shares configuration across multiple microservices.Your build file will be significantly smaller and easier to manage because you won’t need to declare a dependency on every library you might need. Chapter 16 introduces the Spring Boot Actuator, an extension to Spring Boot that exposes the internals of a running Spring application as REST endpoints. Chapter 8 looks at using asynchronous communication to enable a Spring application to both send and receive messages using the Java Message Service, RabbitMQ, or Kafka. As always, there’d be absolutely no point in writing this book if it weren’t for the amazing work done by the members of the Spring engineering team. I’m amazed at what you’ve created and how we continue to change how software is developed.