Spring Boot Vs Spring MVC

Spring Boot Vs. Spring MVC: Difference Between Spring Boot & Spring MVC

The Spring Boot and Spring MVC both frameworks are the foundation of the Spring framework. In this topic, we are going to talk about Spring Boot VS Spring MVC. Further, we will see in which conditions they are useful.

Before diving into the topic, let’s have a quick overview of Spring, Spring Boot & Spring MVC.

What is Spring?

Spring is a popular Java Framework for developing Java-based enterprise applications. It allows us to develop several advanced applications such as e-commerce, banking, medical, ERP, POS, etc. It offers a well-structured configuration and programming model to our application for different platforms.

The latest version of the Spring framework is Spring 5 that supports reactive web applications. It develops elastic, responsive applications. The Spring framework’s two main features are dependency injection (DI) and inversion of control (IOC). These features allow us to build loosely coupled applications.

The Spring MVC is completely similar to Spring Framework means all the syntaxes and methods go the same as Spring. But, the Spring Boot is quite different than Spring as it provides the production ready structure and built-in support for the web servers.

What is Spring Boot?

Spring Boot is a Spring-based Java framework that is trendy to develop enterprise applications. It provides an easy way to develop the stand-alone application with minimal configurations (almost zero).

It is developed to reduce the developer’s effort. It makes it easy to develop the production-grade, Spring-powered services and applications with minimum confusion. It is also said that Spring Boot is a combination of Spring applications and embedded servers.

What is Spring MVC?

The MVC stands for Model View Controller. It is a design pattern for Java-based enterprise applications; The Spring Web MVC is the combination of servlet MVC pattern and Spring Framework. If you are familiar with servlet, you must know that the Servlet API has been included in the Spring Framework. It follows the model view designing pattern.

The Spring MVC is the original framework used by the Spring and Spring Boot and other Spring-based frameworks.

The Spring MVC framework is designed on the basis of the controller pattern where Central Servlet, the RequestDispatcher Servlet provides a common (Shared) algorithm for the requests to be processed. The MVC model is widely acceptable and flexible; it supports diverse workflows.

Although there is no serious comparison between Spring Boot and Spring MVC, we can compare it with its uses and features. Let’s see some comparisons:

Features of Spring MVC

Below are some key features of Spring MVC:

• Clear separation of roles: In the Spring MVC framework, each role such as controller, validator, DispatcherServlet, handler mapping, view resolver, etc. can be specified.
• Powerful Configuration: The Spring MVC provides a powerful and easy configuration of both framework and application classes as JavaBeans.
• Adaptability, non-intrusiveness, and flexibility:
• The Spring MVC framework defines any controller method signature using the parameter annotations like @RequestParam, @RequestHeader, @PathVariable, etc.
• Reusability of code:
• There is no need for duplicating the code; We can reuse it by using the existing business objects as command or form objects.
• Customizable binding and validation
• Customizable handler mapping and view resolution
• Flexible model transfer
• Customizable locale, time zone and theme resolution

Features of Spring Boot

Some notable features of Spring Boot are as following:

Auto-configuration: Spring Boot provides autoconfiguration that helps set up your application on the relative environment.further; it hints at what the developers provide.

Stand-alone:

The Spring Boot project is completely stand-alone, which means you don’t need an additional web server or environment to deploy your application. You have to run the project.

Opinionated: The Spring Boot project is opinionated, which means the framework chooses the required things for itself.

Web Development: The web development module is one of the best modules of the spring framework. We can create the project contained an HTTP server with the help of embedded servers. Also, the Spring Boot starter web module is very useful for starting and running applications quickly.

SpringApplication: The SpringApplication is a class that is used to bootstrap a Spring application. This application can be started from the main method. We can start our application by calling a run() method.

public static void main(String[] args){
SpringApplication.run(className.class, args);
}

Application Events and Listeners: The Spring Boot provides events that are used to handle various tasks. It allows us to create factories files to add listeners. It is referred to by using the ApplicationListener key.

Note: It is recommended to create factories file in META-INF folder like META-INF/spring.factories

Admin Support: The Spring Boot provides admin support, which is used for managing and monitoring Spring Boot applications. Each application is treated as a client and registers to the admin server. It is enabled by using Spring .application.admin.enabled property.

Externalized Configuration: The Spring Boot project can be externalized to work with the same application in different environments. The YAML file is used to externalize configuration.

Properties Files: The Spring Boot has a huge collection of Application Properties. It is used to set properties like server-port = 8080 and other properties. It is useful for organizing application properties.

YAML Support: It provides an easy way to specify the hierarchical configuration. The YAML file is a superset of JSON. The SpringApplication class automatically supports YAML; It is a powerful alternative to the properties.

Type-safe Configuration: It provides a strong type-safe configuration to control and validate the configuration of the application. The application configuration has always been a decisive task so that it would be type-safe.

Logging: It uses common logging for all internal logging. The logging dependencies are managed by default. There is no need to change the logging dependency if no required customization is needed.

Security: Spring Boot applications are secure applications as they are secure by default with basic authentication on all HTTP endpoints. A large set of endpoints are available for developing a secure Spring Boot application.

Why is Spring MVC used?

Spring MVC is used for the organized structure of the web application to easily track the files (servlets). It is a way of developing enterprise web applications with some easy core concepts of the servlet, such as Dispatcher Servlet. Model & View, View Resolver. It provides an easy way to develop enterprise web applications.

Why Spring Boot is used?

In a nutshell, Spring Boot is used for minimizing the configurations. Spring Based applications require a lot of configurations. When we use the Spring MVC pattern to develop an application, we need to configure component scan, dispatcher servlet, view resolver, web jars and other things. Spring Boot Starter provides built-in configurations for these files.

Below is some configurations we need to create while working with Spring MVC:

  <bean
        class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver">
        <property name="prefix">
            <value>/WEB-INF/views/</value>
        </property>
        <property name="suffix">
            <value>.jsp</value>
        </property>
  </bean>
  
  <mvc:resources mapping="/webjars/**" location="/webjars/"/>

For the Dispatcher Servlet, we need to perform below configurations:

<servlet>
        <servlet-name>dispatcher</servlet-name>
        <servlet-class>
            org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet
        </servlet-class>
        <init-param>
            <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
            <param-value>/WEB-INF/todo-servlet.xml</param-value>
        </init-param>
        <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
    </servlet>

    <servlet-mapping>
        <servlet-name>dispatcher</servlet-name>
        <url-pattern>/</url-pattern>
    </servlet-mapping>

But when it comes to Spring Boot, it provides autoconfiguration.

Let’s see some Head to Head Differences between Spring Boot & Spring MVC:

Comparative Overview of Spring Boot & Spring MVC

Let’s see some head comparisons between Spring Boot & Spring MVC:

Spring Boot	Spring MVC
Spring Boot is a Spring module for developing the Spring-based application with minimal configurations.	Spring MVC is also a spring framework that works on the model view controller pattern.
It provides auto configurations for developing powerful spring-based applications.	It supports ready to use features for building web-based enterprise applications.
In the Spring Boot, there is no need to build configuration manually.	In the Spring MVC, the configuration is built manually.
There is no need for a deployment descriptor.	A Deployment descriptor is necessary to deploy the applications.
The Spring Boot avoids boilerplate code and wraps dependencies together in a single unit.	In Spring MVC, each dependency is specified separately.
It reduces the developer’s effort by reducing the development time and increases productivity.	It requires more time and effort to achieve the same.

Conclusion:

Both the Spring Boot & Spring MVC are two different things for developing enterprise Java applications. The Spring MVC is used for providing a structured format to the applications; comparatively, the Spring Boot framework is used to reduce the developer’s efforts and minimize the configurations. There is no serious comparison between the technologies. The Spring Boot framework provides built-in support for the Spring MVC pattern.

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