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Building a Boot Web App

Creating a web application structurally using Spring Boot requires almost zero manual configuration aside from establishing the project dependencies.

1. Project Setup​

Most developers initialize a Spring Boot project utilizing the Spring Initializr (start.spring.io) website. Select the following dependencies:

  • Spring Web: Provides Spring MVC and the embedded Tomcat server.
  • Thymeleaf: Provides the rendering engine cleanly mapping HTML templates.

2. Bootstrapping the Main Class​

The initialized project provides a single foundational execution class.

import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication;

@SpringBootApplication
public class MyWebAppApplication {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        // Launches the embedded Tomcat server dynamically
        SpringApplication.run(MyWebAppApplication.class, args);
    }
}

3. Creating the Controller​

Place the controller in the same package structure as the main class so the @ComponentScan can find it safely.

@Controller
public class WebController {
    
    @GetMapping("/dashboard")
    public String loadDashboard(Model model) {
        model.addAttribute("title", "Admin Control Panel");
        // Maps to /src/main/resources/templates/dashboard.html
        return "dashboard"; 
    }
}