What is Spring ?

Spring framework is a Injection dependency framework at first targeting managing life-cycle of Java components (what so-called beans). Today, Spring framework is pretty bloated with tons facilities/helpers on top of it; but if you look at the big picture, it's still a framework that glue things together, a middle man to MVC frameworks (Struts 1,2, JSF etc), ORM frameworks (Hibernate, iBatis, JOOQ etc) and other necessary facilities.

What is Spring Boot ?

Spring is a very popular Java-based framework for building web and enterprise applications. Unlike many other frameworks, which focus on only one area, Spring framework provides a wide verity of features addressing the modern business needs via its portfolio projects.
Spring framework provides flexibility to configure beans in multiple ways such as XML, Annotations, and JavaConfig. With the number of features increased the complexity also gets increased and configuring Spring applications becomes tedious and error-prone.
The Spring team created SpringBoot to address the complexity of configuration.
But before diving into SpringBoot, we will take a quick look at the Spring framework and see what kind of problems SpringBoot is trying to address.
In this article we will cover:

• Overview of Spring framework
• A web application using Spring MVC and JPA(Hibernate)
• A quick taste of SpringBoot

The primary goals of Spring Boot are:

• To provide a radically faster and widely accessible ‘getting started’ experience for all Spring development
• To be opinionated out of the box, but get out of the way quickly as requirements start to diverge from the defaults
• To provide a range of non-functional features that are common to large classes of projects