Difference between Spring and Spring Boot

Question

There are many people who advised me to use Spring Boot instead of Spring to develop REST web services. I want to know what exactly the difference between the two is?

Answer 1

Unfortunately and I mean this out of personal frustration with Spring boot, I have yet to see any real quantified list, where the differences are explicitly outlined. There is only qualifications such as the rubbish sentence "...opinionated view..." which are bandied about.

What is clear, is that SpringBoot has wrapped up groups of Spring annotations into its own set of annotations, implicitly. Further obfuscating, and making the need for anyone starting out in SpringBoot to have to commit to memory what a particular SpringBoot annotation represents.

My reply therefore is of no quantifiable benefit to the original question, which is analogous to that of the SpringBoot authors. Those behind Spring IMO deliberately set-out to obfuscate, which reflects the obtuseness of their JavaDoc and API's (see SpringBatch API's as an example, if you think I am flaming) that makes one wonder the value of their open-source ethos.

My quest for figuring out SpringBoot continues.