Spring Boot Beginner Friendly Project Structure

 Spring Boot is used for rapid application development and is an opinionated java framework, meaning it embraces the software design paradigm of convention over configuration and is used to create production grade applications with minimal configuration. Its primary goal is to accelerate the development process by reducing boilerplate code and configuration.

Key ingredients:

• Opinionated: It has some default ways of how things should be done as it picks the most common libraries and configurations.
• Standalone: It enables Java applications that run on their own without needing to manually install an external web server(like Tomcat).

Core Features:

• Auto Configuration: Previously it required manual XML and Java configuration for setting up database and security. While Spring Boot looks at Classpath and if it sees the MySQL driver it assumes that a database connection is to be established automatically.
• Starter Dependencies: It provides opinionated starter Project Object Models(POM) for build tools like Maven and Gradle instead of hunting for compatible versions.
• Embedded Servers: Traditionally to run a web app it had required to run the Apache Tomcat Server separately. Spring Boot embeds the server directly into application's .jar file.

Spring Boot Project Structure:

Controller : It handles HTTP Requests and Responses and defines API endpoints.

DTO : Data Transfer Object is an object that carries data between processes and it handles secure data.

Model : It houses the data structures and JPA entities which are mapped to databases tables and DTOs.

Repository : Contains interfaces, classes and methods(APIs) that interacts with databases and their operations.

Security : Security configurations like APIs routes role based access, CORS setting, CSRF setting, JWT settings and more.

Service : It contains the core business logic, it also acts as a bridge between controllers and repositories