In my experience with Spring, several annotations are particularly important due to their frequent use and significant role in simplifying Spring application development. Here are some of the key annotations:
@SpringBootApplication - This is a convenience annotation that combines @EnableAutoConfiguration, @ComponentScan, and @Configuration. It's typically used on your main application class to enable a host of default behavior, such as setting up a Spring application context and performing class path scanning[2][7].
@Bean - Used at the method level, this annotation tells Spring that a method will return an object that should be registered as a bean in the Spring application context. It's a fundamental annotation for Java-based configurations[1][4].
@Autowired - This annotation is used to auto-wire bean on the setter method, constructor, a property, or methods with arbitrary names and/or multiple arguments. It's incredibly useful for dependency injection, reducing the need for boilerplate code[1][5].
@Component - This is a generic stereotype annotation indicating that the class is a Spring component. It allows the class to be auto-detected through classpath scanning. It's the base annotation that other stereotype annotations like @Repository, @Service, and @Controller are built upon[1][4].
@Service and @Repository - These are specializations of @Component that indicate the annotated class is a service or a repository, respectively. @Service holds business logic, whereas @Repository is used to abstract access to database repositories[1][4].
@Controller and @RestController - @Controller is used to mark a class as a web controller, capable of hand...
