Spring Boot for bootstrapping a component of a larger application

[Rohan Bryant]

My application comprises a number of modules (web, business tier, data tier and so forth). In each such partition I have multiple components.
Distinct groups work on these components independently.

Could Spring Boot be used to bootstrap a component (say, a web service) alone, as opposed to the whole application?

Regards,

/Kobe

[Craig Walls]

Of course. In fact, this is essentially the same story as developing microservice-based applications using Spring Boot and Spring Cloud.

That said, how much Spring Boot can help with "bootstrapping" (see another thread from earlier in this forum on why I don't care for that term) depends on what you want to do. Spring Boot auto-configuration can do a lot of things, but it doesn't know how to do everything. If you want to auto-configure things like Spring MVC (or even Jersey), JPA, AMQP/Rabbit, etc...then Spring Boot can certainly help. If, however, you're looking for Spring Boot to help you auto-configure components for some home-grown or not-so-well-known 3rd party web services library, then you might be out of luck. That's not to say you can't use Spring Boot, as it may still help you in other ways...you just wouldn't gain much help auto-configuring anything Spring Boot doesn't support or know about.

To get a good idea of what Spring Boot auto-configuration *does* support, you might dig around in GitHub at https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot/tree/master/spring-boot-autoconfigure/src/main/java/org/springframework/boot/autoconfigure.