Difference between Spring and Spring Boot

Question

There are many people who advised me to use Spring Boot instead of Spring to develop REST web services. I want to know what exactly the difference between the two is?

Answer 1

In short

1. Spring Boot reduces the need to write a lot of configuration and boilerplate code.
2. It has an opinionated view on Spring Platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with minimum effort.
3. Easy to create standalone applications with embedded Tomcat/Jetty/Undertow.
4. Provides metrics, health checks, and externalized configuration.

You can read more here http://projects.spring.io/spring-boot/

Answer 2

Basically, Spring Boot is an opinionated instance of a Spring application.

Spring Boot is a rapid application development platform. It uses various components of Spring, but has additional niceties like the ability to package your application as a runnable jar, which includes an embedded tomcat (or jetty) server. Additionally, Spring Boot contains a LOT of auto-configuration for you (the opinionated part), where it will pick and choose what to create based on what classes/beans are available or missing.

I would echo their sentiment that if you are going to use Spring I can't think of any reasons to do it without Spring Boot.