Advantages and Disadvantages of using Spring Boot

Diliru Munasingha
2 min readMay 21, 2021

Spring Boot is an open source Java-based framework which specialised to create a micro Services. It is developed by Pivotal Team and is used to build stand-alone and production ready spring applications in all over the industry It provides a good platform for Java developers to develop a stand-alone and production-grade spring application. Also, it allows to get started with minimum configurations without the need for an entire Spring configuration setup.

Advantages of Using Spring Boot

It makes it easier to develop Spring-based applications with Java. And also, it reduces Developer’s effort with the “Opinionated Defaults Configuration” approach.

Spring Boot minimise writing multiple boilerplate codes, XML configuration and annotation, ultimately enhancing productivity while reducing lots of development time, it just all blend together with dependencies which will automatically configure all the necessary files.

Spring Boot makes it easier to integrate the Spring Boot Application with the Spring Ecosystem that majorly includes Spring ORM, Spring JDBC, Spring Security, Spring Data and many other things. Overall it has been tested over and over again and has a solid baseline with a vast verity of community behind.

It tests the web applications easily with the help of different Embedded HTTP servers that includes Tomcat, Jetty and many others. Which means it offers a tremendous amount of flexibility when it comes to developing back-end applications.

It offers Command Line Interface (CLI) tool for developing and testing Spring Boot. Which is perfect for developers to gain an easy control over the framework whenever wanted.

Also, Spring Boot offers a number of plugins for developing and testing Spring Boot Applications easily using Maven/Gradle- the build tools. Integration of these build tools means that the developers do not have to worry about installing all the additional packages when deploying the systems.

Disadvantages of Using Spring Boot

The main struggle for many developers when using Spring Boot is the lack of control over the system. The opinionated style installs many extra dependencies it assumes the system will need. By installing all these extra dependencies (which sometimes go unused), the deployment binary size can become very large in Spring Boot Applications

Since the framework has been built to be agile and lightweight mainly focussing on APIs and micro services to be built using the framework, therefore it should not be used for monolithic applications.

So, these facts summarise the main advantages and disadvantages of using Spring Boot for application development. Cheers !!

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