title: Understanding Spring Boot
body: <p>I am trying to understand the difference between <a href="http://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.springframework.boot/spring-boot-starter/1.3.1.RELEASE" rel="noreferrer">spring boot</a> and <a href="http://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.springframework.boot/spring-boot-starter-web/1.3.1.RELEASE" rel="noreferrer">spring boot web</a>. From this <a href="https://spring.io/guides/gs/spring-boot/" rel="noreferrer">boot tutorial</a> the pom contains spring boot as the parent and spring boot web as a dependency like so:</p>
  
  <pre class="lang-xml prettyprint-override"><code>&lt;parent&gt;
      &lt;groupId&gt;org.springframework.boot&lt;/groupId&gt;
      &lt;artifactId&gt;spring-boot-starter-parent&lt;/artifactId&gt;
      &lt;version&gt;1.3.1.RELEASE&lt;/version&gt;
  &lt;/parent&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <pre class="lang-xml prettyprint-override"><code>&lt;dependencies&gt;
      &lt;dependency&gt;
          &lt;groupId&gt;org.springframework.boot&lt;/groupId&gt;
          &lt;artifactId&gt;spring-boot-starter-web&lt;/artifactId&gt;
      &lt;/dependency&gt;
  &lt;/dependencies&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>What are the uses for the 2 different versions? Do you always use them together? This spring boot <a href="https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/reference/html/production-ready-enabling.html" rel="noreferrer">documentation</a> tells me if the program is production ready to use:</p>
  
  <pre class="lang-xml prettyprint-override"><code>&lt;dependencies&gt;
      &lt;dependency&gt;
          &lt;groupId&gt;org.springframework.boot&lt;/groupId&gt;
          &lt;artifactId&gt;spring-boot-starter-actuator&lt;/artifactId&gt;
      &lt;/dependency&gt;
  &lt;/dependencies&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But if that's the case then why isn't there one for web like so:</p>
  
  <pre class="lang-xml prettyprint-override"><code>&lt;dependencies&gt;
      &lt;dependency&gt;
          &lt;groupId&gt;org.springframework.boot&lt;/groupId&gt;
          &lt;artifactId&gt;spring-boot-starter-web-actuator&lt;/artifactId&gt;
      &lt;/dependency&gt;
  &lt;/dependencies&gt;
  </code></pre>