Introducing Spring Boot

Spring Boot is dedicated to running standalone Spring applications, the same as simple Java applications, with the java -jar command. The basic thing that makes Spring Boot different than standard Spring configuration is simplicity. This simplicity is closely related to the first important term we need to know about, which is a starter. A starter is an artifact that can be included in the project dependencies. It does nothing more than provide a set of dependencies to other artifacts that have to be included in your application in order to achieve the desired functionality. A package delivered in that way is ready for use, which means that we don't have to configure anything to make it work. And that brings us to the second important term related to Spring Boot, auto-configuration. All artifacts included by the starters have default settings set...