What is Spring Boot and what are its main advantages?

Spring Boot is a solution for quickly creating production-ready applications based on the Spring Framework with minimal configuration effort.

Main advantages:

• Auto-configuration: Automatically configures many Spring components based on dependencies added (e.g., DataSource if a database is present).
• Embedded servers: Comes with servers like Tomcat, Jetty, or Undertow, simplifying deployment.
• Starter dependencies: Combine related libraries into convenient sets, simplifying dependency management (e.g., spring-boot-starter-web).
• Production features: Provides management and monitoring functions via Spring Boot Actuator (metrics, health checks, environment info).
• No XML configuration: Prefers annotation and Java-based configuration.
• CLI: Allows quick creation and running of applications from the command line.
• Opinionated defaults: Offers ready-made solutions for many tasks, accelerating development but allowing customization if needed.