Spring Boot vs Spring MVC

Spring is an application framework highly popular for the development of enterprise applications. It is built for Java and allows software developers to implement enterprise systems of various sizes including POS, e-commerce, ERP, banking, and so on. The Spring Framework offers a comprehensive configuration and programming model for the latest enterprise applications based on Java on any type of deployment platform. 

Spring 5 is the latest version of the Spring framework and it has the support for reactive web applications. Being reactive implies that a system is elastic, message-driven, responsive, and resilient. Spring Framework’s two of the most important features are an inversion of control (IOC) and dependency injection (DI). This is because we can build loosely coupled applications when DI and IOC are used properly.

Spring Boot vs Spring MVC - What is the Difference?

What is the Spring Boot?

Spring Boot is a way to ease the creation of a stand-alone application with zero or minimal configurations. It is basically an approach to build applications based on the Spring framework with minimal configuration. Spring Boot makes it easy for the creation of production-grade, spring-powered services, and applications with minimum confusion. 

It can be used for traditional WAR deployments or for the creation of stand-alone Java applications. Spring Boot provides a widely accessible and radically faster ‘getting started’ experience for the entire Spring development. 

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What is Spring MVC?

One of the modules of the Web layer of the Spring Framework is the Web-Servlet module. This module consists of Spring Framework’s MVC (model-view-controller) implementation for web applications. It provides model-view-controller architecture and ready elements that can be utilized to build loosely coupled and flexible web applications. 

The model-view-controller pattern results in dissociating the various aspects of the application such as UI logic, business logic, input logic while offering a loose coupling between these components. Spring MVC is designed around a DispatcherServlet that deals with HTTP requests and responses.

Comparison Of Spring Boot VS Spring MVC

In the above paragraphs, we have learned what is Spring Framework, Spring Boot, and Spring MVC. Now, let’s compare Spring MVC and Spring Boot. One of the most common dilemmas for the newbie developers who want to use Spring Framework is which one they should go for, either for Spring MVC or Spring Boot. 

Well, if you are a new developer, you may think you should go for Spring Boot as it is the latest one. So, let’s dig deeper into the comparison part and understand which one is more recommended than the other. 

   [ Related Article: Spring Cloud Tutorial for Beginners ]

Spring Boot

• Spring Boot enables you to rapidly build and create Spring applications utilizing the Spring framework. 
• You need more configuration on your part if you choose to avoid Spring Boot. 
• The features that only Spring Boot can offer are the capability to create standalone web applications and auto-configuration. 
• You can do things such as incorporate H2 on the build path with the help of auto-configuration. For an in-memory database, Spring will auto-configure the connection details without any further configuration. 
• The starter projects provided by Spring Boot will increase productivity by providing defaults and configurations to minimize the effort of a developer avoiding writing a lot of XML configuration, annotations, and boilerplate code.
• Spring Boot also offers embedded HTTP servers such as Jetty, Tomcat, etc. which you can package together with your applications for creating executable war files. 
• With the help of Spring Boot, you can tell Spring how many of its modules(spring-web, spring-date, spring-core, and so on) to use and you will also get a quick setup for them. 

  [ Related Article: Microservices With Spring Boot ]

Spring MVC

• Spring MVC is an HTTP-oriented web application development framework and is a module of the Spring framework. 
• It provides a decoupled way of building web applications. It will let you implement your web application in accordance with the model-view-controller design pattern. 
• spring MVC is equivalent to JSF(Java Server Faces) in the JavaEE stack. Classes annotated with are the most popular elements in Spring MVC. 
• For the implementation of REST-based APIs, Spring MVC has an equivalent @RestController.

Frequently Asked Spring Boot Interview Questions

You can use Spring MVC if you want to develop a web application with Spring. However, for the development of general Spring applications or beginning to learn Spring, it is recommended that you use Spring Boot as it is production-ready, mitigates the job, and is being quickly adopted. Also, Spring Boot can use Spring MVC and autoconfigure it. In this case, the choice won’t be between MVC and Boot but between Boot or Bootless. This depends on how open to associated risks and innovation your organization is. 

Today, most of the Spring projects are integrated completely with Boot and even the Spring community began to develop various applications based on Spring Boot(monitoring and managing for example). You can benefit from very nice and useful features like remote shell and actuator for monitoring and managing with Boot. This enhances your application with production-ready features.

Frequently Asked MVC Interview Questions

Spring Boot has very powerful and nice configuration controls. Because of these, you can extend the Boot in a very simple and impressive way. The boot is one of the first microservice ready platforms. 

Your project configuration will be very simple with the help of Boot and you need not maintain an XML file as well. The boot provides a lot of default implementation and JPA integration and Spring Hibernate will be pretty simple.

Related Article: What is Bean in Java Spring

Conclusion

So, if you look at the comparison part, Spring Boot is more useful when compared with Spring MVC as it has many inbuilt features and benefits which make it more reliable to use than MVC. Most of the things are auto-configured using Boot. Just like Tomcat, Boot bundles a war file with server runtime. This enables easy deployment and distribution of web applications. 

Spring Boot is quite useful for container-based deployments as the industry is moving towards them. Though Spring MVC is the oldest and widely used JVM web framework and it has a large community of followers that are quite helpful and have provided numerous answers and tutorials, the popularity of Spring Boot is growing at a rapid pace and the reasons are mentioned clearly in the above section. 

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