Spring Boot Web Application with Eclipse in 5 Clicks

This article represents tips and code samples to get you started quickly with Spring web application within few clicks. Please feel free to comment/suggest if I missed mentioning one or more important points. Also, sorry for the typos.

Steps to get started with Spring Boot Web Application

• Go to Help > Eclipse Marketplace… and search type “spring sts” in Find text field under Search tab. Install the entry with the title such as “Spring Tool Suite (STS) for Eclipse Release”.

  Download Spring STS from Eclipse Marketplace

  Once installed, you would be asked to restart the Eclipse. Go ahead and restart the eclipse.

• Open the new Project selector window using shortcut, CTRL + N. Type “Spring Starter” and double-click the entry namely, “Spring Starter Project”. It would take you to next window such as following. Just click “Next” and move to next step.

  Spring Starter Project Creation Dialog Box

• On next window, select the dependencies as “Web” as shown in the diagram below.

  Spring Starter Project Creation Dialog Box – Configuration

  Click Finish. This would create the project whose source code and config files/libraries structure would look following. Note the DemoApplication.java file which gets created by default.

  Spring Starter Project Source Code Structure

   

• Right-click on the project as shown below and start the Spring Boot app.

  Spring Starter Project Run as Spring Boot App

  Once the web app starts, access the web app in browser using URL such as http://localhost:8080/

  Access Spring Boot App From Browser

   

• Tweak the DemoApplication code a little to start working with the Web App.

  package com.example;
  
  import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication;
  import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication;
  import org.springframework.stereotype.Controller;
  import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;
  import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.ResponseBody;
  
  @Controller
  @SpringBootApplication
  public class DemoApplication {
   
   @RequestMapping("/")
   @ResponseBody
      String home() {
          return "Hello World. How are you?";
      }
   
   public static void main(String[] args) {
    SpringApplication.run(DemoApplication.class, args);
   }
  }
  

  The same code could be found on the Spring Boot homepage. Relaunch the web app and see the changes like following by access the http://localhost:8080 in the browser.

  Spring Starter Project Run as Spring Boot App – Hello World