This week 7/2017

Spring Boot (v. 1.5.x) is a project which supports developer in creating and boot application. Application created by it integrates with long technology stack list mentioned in project reference guide.
Creation of complex application is very easy. Developer add dependences of starter artefact and application should work with default settings. If he need to change defaults, he can add properties file, add custom annotation or set custom settings in code.
Simple application is ready in a few seconds, there is needed only a custom pom or gradle file and writing a few lines of code - simple class with annotation

@EnableAutoConfiguration

and main method in which is execution of run method of the SpringApplication class.
If there is needed a web application, it is not a problem. Spring Boot supports three web containers Tomcat/Jetty/Undertow. If there is needed something else probably it is not a problem as well list is truly long.

Spring Boot contains additional development tools supporting Http caching, automatic restart of application after source update and few less important things for me. 

In my case, I was most interested in automatic restart and hot swapping. DevTools don't contain solution as good as JRebel and Spring Loaded because they don't reload byte code during runtime but restart part of application. This solution splits class path on the unchangeable paths and changeable. This first is loaded by standard class loader. The second is loaded by loader which is removed during restart and created new one. It is possible to choose jar files which should be replaced during restart.

Spring Boot support loading configuration parameters (@ConfigurationProperties) and validate them during application start.

In the end I can add that there is a page with an application creator. Generator create pom/gladle file with selected technology stack and sample code.