Spring Boot – Starters
Before Spring Boot was introduced, Spring Developers used to spend a lot of time on Dependency management. Spring Boot Starters were introduced to solve this problem so that the developers can spend more time on actual code than Dependencies. Spring Boot Starters are dependency descriptors that can be added under the <dependencies> section in pom.xml. There are around 50+ Spring Boot Starters for different Spring and related technologies. These starters give all the dependencies under a single name. For example, if you want to use Spring Data JPA for database access, you can include spring-boot-starter-data-jpa dependency.
The advantages of using Starters are as follows:
- Increase productivity by decreasing the Configuration time for developers.
- Managing the POM is easier since the number of dependencies to be added is decreased.
- Tested, Production-ready, and supported dependency configurations.
- No need to remember the name and version of the dependencies.
Spring Boot Starter Data JPA is illustrated below:
<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-data-jpa</artifactId>
</dependency>
</dependencies>This gives all the required dependencies and can be seen under the Maven tab in IntelliJ IDEA.
In earlier days, developers used to include all those dependencies. Now Spring Boot Starters provides all those with just a single dependency. The official starters follow a naming convention spring-boot-starter-*, where * denotes application type. For example, if we want to build web including RESTful applications using Spring MVC we have to use spring-boot-starter-web dependency.
Third-Party Starters
If you want to make your own starter or other third-party starters name should not start with spring-boot as it reserved for official Spring Boot Starters. It can start with the name of the project. For example, if the name of the project is gfg-code-template, then the name of the starter can be gfg-code-template-spring-boot-starter.
Here out we will be discussing all 3 starters and the following starters are provided by the Spring Boot under org.springframework.boot group. They are namely and covered as follows:
- Application Starters
- Production Starters
- Technical Starters
Let us elaborate these starters in the same sequential order which is as follows:
(A) Spring Boot Application Starters Name Descriptionspring-boot-starter Core starter, including auto-configuration support, logging, and YAML spring-boot-starter-activemq Starter for JMS messaging using Apache ActiveMQ spring-boot-starter-amqp Starter for using Spring AMQP and Rabbit MQ spring-boot-starter-aop Starter for aspect-oriented programming with Spring AOP and AspectJ spring-boot-starter-artemis Starter for JMS messaging using Apache Artemis spring-boot-starter-batch Starter for using Spring Batch spring-boot-starter-cache Starter for using Spring Framework’s caching support spring-boot-starter-data-cassandra Starter for using Cassandra distributed database and Spring Data Cassandra spring-boot-starter-data-cassandra-reactive Starter for using Cassandra distributed database and Spring Data Cassandra Reactive spring-boot-starter-data-couchbase Starter for using Couchbase document-oriented database and Spring Data Couchbase spring-boot-starter-data-couchbase-reactive Starter for using Couchbase document-oriented database and Spring Data Couchbase Reactive spring-boot-starter-data-elasticsearch Starter for using Elasticsearch search and analytics engine and Spring Data Elasticsearch spring-boot-starter-data-jdbc Starter for using Spring Data JDBC spring-boot-starter-data-jpa Starter for using Spring Data JPA with Hibernate spring-boot-starter-data-ldap Starter for using Spring Data LDAP spring-boot-starter-data-mongodb Starter for using MongoDB document-oriented database and Spring Data MongoDB spring-boot-starter-data-mongodb-reactive Starter for using MongoDB document-oriented database and Spring Data MongoDB Reactive spring-boot-starter-data-neo4j Starter for using Neo4j graph database and Spring Data Neo4j spring-boot-starter-data-r2dbc Starter for using Spring Data R2DBC spring-boot-starter-data-redis Starter for using Redis key-value data store with Spring Data Redis and the Lettuce client spring-boot-starter-data-redis-reactive Starter for using Redis key-value data store with Spring Data Redis reactive and the Lettuce client spring-boot-starter-data-rest Starter for exposing Spring Data repositories over REST using Spring Data REST spring-boot-starter-freemarker Starter for building MVC web applications using FreeMarker views spring-boot-starter-groovy-templates Starter for building MVC web applications using Groovy Templates views spring-boot-starter-hateoas Starter for building hypermedia-based RESTful web application with Spring MVC and Spring HATEOAS spring-boot-starter-integration Starter for using Spring Integration spring-boot-starter-jdbc Starter for using JDBC with the HikariCP connection pool spring-boot-starter-jersey Starter for building RESTful web applications using JAX-RS and Jersey. An alternative to spring-boot-starter-web spring-boot-starter-jooq Starter for using jOOQ to access SQL databases. An alternative to spring-boot-starter-data-jpa or spring-boot-starter-jdbc spring-boot-starter-json Starter for reading and writing json spring-boot-starter-jta-atomikos Starter for JTA transactions using Atomikos spring-boot-starter-mail Starter for using Java Mail and Spring Framework’s email sending support spring-boot-starter-mustache Starter for building web applications using Mustache views spring-boot-starter-oauth2-client Starter for using Spring Security’s OAuth2/OpenID Connect client features spring-boot-starter-oauth2-resource-server Starter for using Spring Security’s OAuth2 resource server features spring-boot-starter-quartz Starter for using the Quartz scheduler spring-boot-starter-rsocket Starter for building RSocket clients and servers spring-boot-starter-security Starter for using Spring Security spring-boot-starter-test Starter for testing Spring Boot applications with libraries including JUnit Jupiter, Hamcrest and Mockito spring-boot-starter-thymeleaf Starter for building MVC web applications using Thymeleaf views spring-boot-starter-validation Starter for using Java Bean Validation with Hibernate Validator spring-boot-starter-web Starter for building web, including RESTful, applications using Spring MVC. Uses Tomcat as the default embedded container. spring-boot-starter-web-services Starter for using Spring Web Services spring-boot-starter-webflux Starter for building WebFlux applications using Spring Framework’s Reactive Web support spring-boot-starter-websocket Starter for building WebSocket applications using Spring Framework’s WebSocket support
(B) Spring Boot Production Starters Name Descriptionspring-boot-starter-actuator Starter for using Spring Boot’s Actuator which provides production-ready features to help you monitor and manage your application
(C) Spring Boot Technical Starters Name Descriptionspring-boot-starter-jetty Starter for using Jetty as the embedded servlet container. An alternative to spring-boot-starter-tomcat spring-boot-starter-log4j2 Starter for using Log4j2 for logging. An alternative to spring-boot-starter-logging spring-boot-starter-logging Starter for logging using Logback. Default logging starter spring-boot-starter-reactor-netty Starter for using Reactor Netty as the embedded reactive HTTP server. spring-boot-starter-tomcat Starter for using Tomcat as the embedded servlet container. Default servlet container starter used by spring-boot-starter-web spring-boot-starter-undertow Starter for using Undertow as the embedded servlet container. An alternative to spring-boot-starter-tomcat
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