Running the application

Before we run the application, let's have a walk through our project structure. 

Open the project on IntelliJ IDEA using the Import Project or Open options (both are similar), the following page will be displayed:

Then we can open or import the pom.xml file.

The following project structure should be displayed:

Open the pom.xml, we have three dependencies, spring-boot-starter-thymeleaf, spring-boot-starter-web, spring-boot-starter-test, and an interesting plugin, spring-boot-maven-plugin.

These starter dependencies are a shortcut for developers because they provide full dependencies for the module. For instance, on the spring-boot-starter-web, there is web-mvc, jackson-databind, hibernate-validator-web, and some others; these dependencies must be on the classpath to run the web applications, and starters make this task considerably easier.

Let's analyze our pom.xml, the file should look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven...