A Compact Guide to Spring Boot AutoConfigurator Component

An important key component of Spring Boot Framework is Spring Boot AutoConfigurator and by knowing this you can avoid many configurations to configure in your application. Many critics have given their opinion about Spring IO Platform (Spring Framework) is that “To develop a Spring-based application requires a lot of configuration (Either XML Configuration of Annotation Configuration). Then how to solve this problem.

Spring Boot AutoConfigurator is the solution to this problem. Spring Boot AutoConfigurator reduces the Spring Configuration and its the main advantage of using it. We don't need to define single XML configuration and almost no or minimal Annotation configuration while using spring boot. Its component will take care of providing that information.

For example, if we want to declare a Spring MVC application using Spring IO Platform, then we need to define a lot of XML Configuration like views, view resolvers etc. But if we use Spring Boot Framework, then we don't need to define those XML configurations. Spring Boot AutoConfigurator will take of this.

All the components like views, view resolvers etc will be resolved by Spring Boot AutoConfigurator automatically. We will only have to use “spring-boot-starter-web” jar file in our project build file.

Annotation configuration will also be reduced by using Spring Boot. If we use @SpringBootApplication annotation at class level, then Spring Boot AutoConfigurator will automatically add all required annotations to Java Class ByteCode.

@SpringBootApplication = @Configuration + @ComponentScan + @EnableAutoConfiguration

From the Spring Boot Documentation, we can find the following definition for @SpringBootApplication.

@Target(value=TYPE)
@Retention(value=RUNTIME)
@Documented
@Inherited
@Configuration
@EnableAutoConfiguration
@ComponentScan
public @interface SpringBootApplication

That’s all about Spring Boot AutoConfigurate component.

NOTE:-
    All the dependencies required to start a spring boot project will be reduced by Spring Boot Starter while AutoConfigurator reduces the Spring Configuration.
    When a Spring Boot application is started the AutoConfigurator will be triggered automatically by Spring Boot Starter.