Creating a reactive web application with Spring Initializr

In the last chapter, we took a quick tour through the Spring Initializr site at http://start.spring.io. Let's go back there and pick some basic ingredients to start building our social media site by picking the options needed as shown in the following screenshot:

As shown in the preceding screenshot, we've picked the following options:

• Build system: Gradle
• Spring Boot Version: 2.0
• Group: com.greglturnquist.learningspringboot
• Artifact: learning-spring-boot

For dependencies, we are going to use these:

• Reactive Web: This pulls in Reactive Spring, something we'll explore here and through the rest of this book
• Lombok: This is a tiny library that keeps Java interesting by handling getters, setters, toString, equals, hashCode, and more
• Thymeleaf: This is not Boot's only supported template library, but...