If you have worked with the decade-old Spring framework, you know well that it has a long history of providing configuration headaches for developers. The new Spring Boot framework, on the other hand, literally brings much-needed simplification and automation to the process of using Spring. And it can put some refreshing fun back into application development.

“Spring Boot,” Craig Walls states in his new book, “is an exciting new way to develop Spring applications with minimal friction from the framework itself. Auto-configuration eliminates much of the boilerplate configuration that infests traditional Spring applications. Spring Boot starters enable you to specify build dependencies by what they offer rather than use explicit library names and version. The Spring Boot CLI takes Spring Boot’s frictionless development model to a whole new level by enabling quick and easy development with Groovy from the command line. And the [Spring Boot] Actuator lets you look inside your running application to see what and how Spring Boot has done.”

You do not need a lot of Spring experience to benefit from this book. You do need some Java background, and it is helpful to have used Groovy, Gradle and Maven a few times. But the book’s text is written smoothly, and it is well illustrated, with numerous code examples and a few screen shoots. So Java developers who are fairly new likely can use it and pick up new skills.

While going through the book, you develop a reading-list application using Spring Initializr, Spring Boot, Spring Tool Suite, and other tools. In the project, you “use Spring MVC to handle web requests, Thymeleaf to define web views, and Spring Data JPA to persist the reading selections to a database,” Craig Walls explains. Initially, at least, “an embedded H2 database” is employed during development.

Walls’s book is divided into eight chapters:

1. Bootstarting Spring
2. Developing your first Spring Boot Application
3. Customizing configuration
4. Testing with Spring Boot
5. Getting Groovy with the Spring Boot CLI
6. Applying Grails in Spring Boot
7. Taking a peek inside the Actuator
8. Deploying Spring Boot applications

Four appendices also are presented: Spring Boot developer tools, Spring Boot starters, Configuration properties, and Spring Boot dependencies.

Bottom line: with Spring Boot providing much of the heavy lifting, you likely will gain better feelings about the venerable Spring framework. You may even wind up with a healthy new respect for it. And Spring Boot certainly should add more years to Spring’s usefulness and viability in the marketplace.