Spring Boot 0.5.0.M5 is available in the Spring repo. Instructions for installing and using are on the project website or in github. Loads of new features including:

• Autoconfigure support for JMS, AMQP, AOP, Mobile, MongoDB
• Simplified @Grab usage (see example below)
• A test command for Groovy scripts (supporting JUnit and Spock, more detail coming on that in a blog from Greg)
• A new SpringApplicationBuilder with support for, amongst other things, application context hierarchies
• A new PropertiesLauncher that can launch a Java application from properties discovered at runtime (e.g. to set up a classpath from a lib directory)

As a taster, here is an example usage of SpringApplicationBuilder in Java to build an application with a parent context (useful if you want to run more than one app from the same code):

@Configuration
@EnableAutoConfiguration
public class Server {

	public static void main(String[] args) {
		new SpringApplicationBuilder(Parent.class)
                    .child(Server.class)
                    .profiles("server")
                    .run(args);
	}

        // ... @Bean definitions follow
}

The Parent.class above is a shared parent context that can be reused for other apps in the same module.

And here's an example of the abbreviated @Grab in a Groovy app (the group and version information are added automatically):

@Grab("spring-boot-starter-actuator")
@RestController
class Example {

	@RequestMapping("/")
	String home() {
		[message: 'Hello World']
	}
}

This app runs on its own, e.g. in the current directory if you use the spring shell script to launch it:

$ spring run app.groovy
... (app starts up)

Visit http://localhost:8080/ in a browser and then try http://localhost:8080/metrics.