How it works...

Because of the usage of Spring Boot we can take advantage of projects like Spring MVC and Spring Security. These Spring projects help us to write web applications, REST APIs, and help us to secure our applications. By using the Spring Security OAuth2 project, for example, we can configure our own OAuth 2.0 Providers in addition, to act like clients. This is important because someone trying to write his own OAuth Provider will have to deal with too many details which could easily lead to an insecure OAuth Provider. Spring Security OAuth2 already addresses the main concerns any developer would have to think about.

In addition, Spring Boot eases the initial steps for the bootstrap of the application. When creating a Spring project without Spring Boot we need to deal with dependencies manually by taking care of possible library conflicts. To solve this problem, Spring Boot has some pre-configured modules provided by starters. As an example of a useful starter, let's consider an application with Spring Data JPA. Instead of declaring all the dependencies for hibernate, entity-manager, and transaction-api, just by declaring spring-boot-starter-data-jpa all the dependencies will be imported automatically.

While starting using Spring Boot, things can still become easier by using the Spring Initializr service provided by Pivotal (the Spring maintainer now).