What distinguishes Spring Boot from the core Spring platform, and what are their functional differences?

Spring is a powerful framework for developing Java applications, providing infrastructure for dependency injection, aspect-oriented programming, and much more. It requires significant configuration and setup.

Spring Boot is an extension of Spring that simplifies application creation by:

• Auto-configuration, which selects default settings.
• Built-in web server (e.g., Tomcat), allowing the application to run as a standalone jar.
• Minimizing the need to write XML configurations or a lot of code for setup.

Thus, Spring Boot accelerates development and simplifies application deployment by leveraging Spring's capabilities but with less effort in configuration.