spring initializr: spring-boot-starter vs spring-boot-starter-web

Question

I am trying to develop a sample spring boot based application in IntellIJ. So I used spring Initialzr approach, and made default selections during the setup. The pom.xml I ended

Answer 1

spring-boot-starter-web contains the following dependencies:

• spring-boot-starter
• jackson
• spring-core
• spring-mvc
• spring-boot-starter-tomcat

Using IntelliJ, you can view the dependencies of your artifacts at the bottom of the project structure.

Given that spring-boot-starter is a dependency of spring-boot-starter-web, it would be useless to have both. It wouldn't do any harm if you kept both either, just unnecessary.