Spring RESTful Service as a WAR instead of JAR in Tomcat

Question

I am in the process of creating a REST web service in Java Spring. I\'ve successfully loaded STS and the example detailed at :

\"This guide walks you through the pr

Answer 1

(Answer from OP moved from question to here)

Boy I feel really dumb.. Found there was more to the tutorial after changing the gradle instructions.. including the very needed Auto Configuration that supercedes/replaces the need for a web.xml

Solution

Initialize the servlet

Previously, the application contained a public static void main() method which the spring-boot-gradle-plugin was configured to run when using the java -jar command.

By converting this into a WAR file with no XML files, you need a different signal to the servlet container on how to launch the application.

src/main/java/hello/HelloWebXml.java

package hello;

import org.springframework.boot.builder.SpringApplicationBuilder;
import org.springframework.boot.web.SpringBootServletInitializer;

public class HelloWebXml extends SpringBootServletInitializer {

  @Override
  protected void configure(SpringApplicationBuilder application) {
     application.sources(Application.class);
  }

}

Will give credit to the first answer, but you both were correct that the web.xml (or what Spring-Boot uses to replace it) was needed.