First of all, let's start with clearing out a few misconceptions about Spring Boot:

• Spring Boot is not a code generation framework. It does not generate any code.
• Spring Boot is neither an application server, nor is it a web server. It provides good integration with different ranges of applications and web servers.
• Spring Boot does not implement any specific frameworks or specifications.

These questions still remain:

• What is Spring Boot?
• Why has it become so popular in the last couple of years?

To answer these questions, let's build a quick example. Let's consider an example application that you want to quickly prototype.