Starter Dependencies

Spring was used in large enterprise applications that typically leveraged lots of different technology to do the heavy lifting: JDBC databases, message queues, file systems, application-level caching, etc. A developer would have to stop what she’s doing, switch cognitive contexts, figure out what dependencies belonged to which piece of functionality (“Oh, I need the JPA dependencies!”) and spend lots of time sorting out versioning mismatches or issues that would arise when trying to use these various pieces together. Spring Boot offers a large collection of curated sets of libraries for adding these pieces of functionality. These starter modules allow you to add things like:

• JPA persistence
• NoSQL databases like MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase
• Redis caching
• Tomcat/Jetty/Undertow servlet engine
• JTA transactions

Adding a submodule to your application brings in the curated set of transitive dependencies and versions that are known to work together saving developers from having to sort out dependencies themselves.