Spring Boot Starters

They exist for your convenience. By adding a spring boot starter you can offload some of the work to add different depndencies that needs to play together with each other. As an idea it’s not so bad, it’s kind of like plug and play, you add one dependency and then you’re ready to go.

For me, I’m not so happy with this solution. I feel that there is a loss of control connected to this as I don’t fully know what was added in this dependency. You’re project might look small with just a couple of spring boot starters, but in reality it might actually be quite big with many bundled dependencies that you are using, and also most likely some that you have but you don’t use.

It is the part of Java and spring boot with which I have a difficult time to reconcile myself with. It feels like the speed of doing new features is accomplished by doing a lot of magic in the background. The problem (the biggest of these things being Jars that change stuff just because they happen to be part of your project). It is great as long as you don’t have a problem, but once you get a problem you have a headache to figure out what this magic that is happening under the hood really is.