Spring Boot supports both properties and YAML for externalized config. And good news: Spring Initializr now lets you choose Properties or YAML directly in the form (recently surfaced on start.spring.io; support landed in Initializr v0.23).

- application.properties 📄 — Flat & explicit; great for grepping, diffs, and small configs. Fewer indentation pitfalls.

- application.yaml / yml 🧾 — Hierarchical & compact; shines for maps/lists and in-file profile sections (---). Watch whitespace.

- It depends 🤷‍. — Let team standards, tooling (IDE linters, schema hints), and platform (K8s/Config Server/Vault) guide the pick.

“APIs should be easy to use and hard to misuse.” — Joshua Bloch, Effective Java

#SpringBoot #Java #Configuration #YAML #Properties #DevOps #Kubernetes #SpringFramework #CleanCode

Spring-Initializr-0.23-Release-Notes: https://github.com/spring-io/initializr/wiki/Spring-Initializr-0.23-Release-Notes