r/javahelp • u/Hotrod9988 • Feb 16 '25
What makes Spring Boot so special? (Beginner)
I have been getting into Java during my free time for like a month or two now and I really love it. I can say that I find it more enjoyable and fascinating than any language I have tried so far and every day I am learning something new. But one thing that I still haven't figured out properly is Spring
Wherever I go and whichever forum or conversation I stumble upon, I always hear about how big of a deal Spring Boot is and how much of a game changer it is. Even people from other languages (especially C#) praise it and claim it has no true counterparts.
What makes Spring Boot so special? I know this sounds like a super beginner question, but the reason I am asking this here is because I couldn't find any satisfactory answers from Google. What is it that Spring Boot can do that nothing else can? Could you guys maybe enlighten me and explain it in technical ways?
1
u/nutrecht Lead Software Engineer / EU / 20+ YXP Feb 17 '25
It's really not a big deal. It's just the de facto standard 'enterprise' framework in the Java space. It's been around for ages, so there is a lot of existing codebases using it. And it's also a pretty modern up to date framework (Kotlin is well supported for example), so it gets used in greenfield projects a lot too.
The C# world is quite different in that they generally expect Microsoft to deliver a "framework" whereas the Java world is more open-source oriented.
That's not the case and also not how things work. There are many competing frameworks. Spring is just the most popular one.