Getting Started with Spring Boot in 2026

Spring Boot continues to be one of the most powerful frameworks for building Java applications. In this post, I'll share some notes from my recent experience working with Spring Boot 3.x.

Why Spring Boot?

Spring Boot simplifies the development of production-ready applications by:

• Auto-configuration: Automatically configures your application based on the dependencies you add
• Embedded servers: Run your application as a standalone JAR with an embedded Tomcat, Jetty, or Undertow
• Production-ready features: Health checks, metrics, and externalized configuration

Quick Setup

Here's how to get started with a new Spring Boot project:

@SpringBootApplication
public class Application {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(Application.class, args);
    }
}

Key Dependencies

For a typical REST API, you'll want these dependencies:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-data-jpa</artifactId>
</dependency>

Next Steps

In future posts, I'll cover:

• Building RESTful APIs with Spring Boot
• Database integration with JPA and Hibernate
• Testing strategies for Spring applications

Stay tuned for more backend development content!