Maven vs. Gradle

Spring Boot lets you create a Spring Boot project with either Apache Maven () or Gradle () build tools. In the Spring Initializr () tool, you can choose the build system of your choice and generate the project.

Java vs. Kotlin

You can use both Java and Kotlin () programming languages in your Spring Boot project. Spring Framework 5.0 has incorporated support for Kotlin. For instance, in Spring Security 5.3, the Spring team has introduced a Kotlin version of their domain-specific language (DSL) support to Spring Security.

Database support

Spring Boot extends support to an array of SQL and NoSQL databases.

Lombok

Lombok () is a Java library that automatically generates the constructors, getter, setter, toString, and others based on the presence of a few annotations in the plain old Java object (POJO) class. All you need to do is use the appropriate annotation in the POJO class. For instance, to generate a getter method for all member variables in the POJO class, you can specify @Getter annotation in the class.

If you do not wish to use a third-party library, such as Lombok, you may consider using Java records().

Java 14 has introduced the concept of records in the Java language. Records are immutable data classes that require you to specify only the type and name of the fields. The Java compiler can then generate the equals, hashCode, and toString methods. It also generates the private final fields, getter methods, and public constructor.

A record can be defined as follows:

Public record Course(int id, String name, String description, int rating) {}

The compiler generates the public constructor with all the defined fields and provides getter methods with the same as the field names (e.g., id(), name() etc.) as well as equals and hashCode methods.