Developing Java Applications with Spring and Spring Boot

How to do it...

1. The very first thing that we will need to do is add a new dependency to build.gradle with the spring-boot-starter-web starter to get us all the necessary libraries for web-based functionality. The following code snippet is what it will look like:

dependencies { 
  compile("org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-data-jpa") 
  compile("org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-jdbc") 
  compile("org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-web") 
  runtime("com.h2database:h2")   runtime("mysql:mysql-connector-java")
  testCompile("org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-test") 
} 

2. Next, we will need to create a Spring controller that will be used to handle the web requests for the catalog data in our application. Let's start ...