I’ve been recently developing a Spring Boot application, and to speed up my development speed, I added Developer Tools as a dependency. By default, classes loaded in the HotSpot JVM can be updated only if the later runs in debug mode, and only for changes regarding method implementation. This means adding an attribute to an class requires a full restart. DevTools is an improvement over that.

If you’re developing with Spring Boot, IntelliJ IDEA does offer a lot of niceties to speed up development. Let’s browse through some of them.