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Spring vs Spring MVC vs Spring Boot

3 min readFeb 20, 2025

In this article, we will learn what is Spring, Spring MVC, and Spring Boot and what are the differences between them. This is one of the frequently asked interview questions in interviews with beginners as well as experienced candidates.

Spring Framework

The Spring Framework is an open-source framework for creating enterprise-level Java applications. It provides comprehensive infrastructure support, allowing developers to focus on building robust applications without worrying about underlying infrastructure problems like transaction management, logging, and security.

Features:

Inversion of Control (IoC) Container: The IoC container is responsible for creating, configuring, and managing application objects (beans). It automates object management by injecting dependencies, leading to more modular and testable code.

Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP): AOP helps separate cross-cutting concerns like logging, transactions, and security from the main business logic. This separation promotes code modularity and reusability.

Data Access / Integration: Spring simplifies database access and exception handling with JDBC. It also integrates seamlessly with popular Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) frameworks like Hibernate, JPA, and JDO.

Transaction Management: Offers a consistent, programmatic, and declarative mechanism for transaction management, ensuring that data remains consistent and the system remains robust.

Security: Provides comprehensive security features such as authentication, authorization, and protection against common vulnerabilities in web applications and RESTFul web services.

Messaging: Spring’s messaging module helps with the development of messaging-based applications. It provides support for both traditional messaging systems and newer ones like Apache Kafka.

Spring MVC

Spring MVC is a module of the Spring Framework specifically designed for developing web applications following the Model-View-Controller pattern.

Spring MVC module is used to build both web applications and RESTFul web services.

Features:

DispatcherServlet: Central servlet handling HTTP requests and delegating responsibilities.

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