Spring vs. Spring Boot
Spring Boot is built on top of Spring, so they are not alternatives — but they signal different eras of Java work. Plain Spring (2003) needed a lot of hand-written setup and usually ran inside a separate application server. Spring Boot (2014) does that setup automatically and is the default for new Java services. Nearly every Boot developer is 'using Spring'; not every older Spring developer has worked the Boot way.
How to tell them apart on a resume
Spring (classic)
XML configuration, Spring MVC, WAR files deployed to Tomcat, WebLogic or JBoss, Java EE — typically an older, single large application.
Spring Boot
Microservices, REST APIs, Spring Cloud, Spring Data JPA, Docker, Kubernetes, embedded server — a newer service-based setup.
The question that settles it
“Were your Spring applications set up with XML and deployed to an application server, or built as Spring Boot services — and roughly how many services did you own?”
Read the full definitions
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