@buherator They made dependency injection easy, and then slowly added everything and the kitchen sink. It's still possible to use just for DI, but adding dependency on another spring module is often the path of least resistance. Until we ended up with Spring Boot, a framework to configure the framework, because it's way to complicated.
@buherator @wiverson
The idea behind DI is that it makes writing tests easier, so the need to debug is less frequent. It's pretty much the core of spring, any other feature depends on it. But if you *only* want that, there are light weight frameworks like Guice.
I don't know any decent spring security replacements, and if you need it, why not just use the rest of spring. For auth it's pretty OK, but for access control it's more trouble than it's worth.
@buherator lol. There is a guide which explains how to use databases with spring boot. if that doesn't work for you, maybe tell us what exactly is the problem?