What are/do these dependencies?

Question

I started working with programming about three weeks ago, they gave me the code and I’m lost.

Until yesterday I only knew how to leave the Eclipse terminal, and now I have all these libraries (I think that’s the name) and I would like to know what they are and what they are for.

They were in the pom.xml file.

<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>

<groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-context</artifactId>

<groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-aop</artifactId>

<groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-webmvc</artifactId>

<groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-web</artifactId>

<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-data-jpa</artifactId>

<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-security</artifactId>

<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-mail</artifactId>

<groupId>javax.servlet</groupId>
<artifactId>jstl</artifactId>

<groupId>javax.servlet</groupId>
<artifactId>javax.servlet-api</artifactId>

<groupId>com.zaxxer</groupId>
<artifactId>HikariCP</artifactId>

<groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
<artifactId>hibernate-entitymanager</artifactId>

<groupId>org.springframework.data</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-data-jpa</artifactId>

<groupId>org.apache.commons</groupId>
<artifactId>commons-io</artifactId>

<groupId>commons-fileupload</groupId>
<artifactId>commons-fileupload</artifactId>

<groupId>junit</groupId>
<artifactId>junit</artifactId>

<groupId>mysql</groupId>
<artifactId>mysql-connector-java</artifactId>

Answer 1

These dependencies are nothing less than external libraries that the application will use.

For example, it seems that this application uses Spring Boot. Thus, it was necessary to add to the project the Spring Boot libraries and some others like the Mysql database connector, etc.

In Java you have the so-called native classes and interfaces, which are those available in JDK/JRE. But when using a framework like Spring, it is then necessary to add the classes/interfaces referring to Spring. And they are available through external libraries (dependencies).