Difference between spring-data-jpa and spring-boot-starter-data-jpa

This may not be the best question to ask, but I noticed there are 2 Spring JPA for Spring boot. How are they different? Currently, I am trying to set up a Spring Boot 1.5.3 project along with Hibernate. I remember I had set up Spring Boot with JPA earlier with spring-boot-starter-data-jpa.

Most of the online examples I have seen as well as starter.spring.io provide the below dependency for Spring JPA.

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

But in one of the existing projects I came across spring-data-jpa:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.data</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-data-jpa</artifactId>
    <version>1.11.4.RELEASE</version>
</dependency>

Doing a bit of Google did not give me if they are different or not.

In all my previous projects where I added JPA was though JPA 2.1/Hibernate that is why I am a bit unsure which of the 2 to use in my new Spring Boot application.

Answer

As stated in the docs, the starter one is a convenient inliner for all required dependencies for this particular library, i.e. includes other dependencies in itself, instead of you writing those manually.

Look into the spring-boot-starter-data-jpa pom.xml, you will see there it includes spring-data-jpa as a dependency among many others.

Spring Boot Starters are a set of convenient dependency descriptors that you can include in your application. You get a one-stop-shop for all the Spring and related technology that you need without having to hunt through sample code and copy paste loads of dependency descriptors. For example, if you want to get started using Spring and JPA for database access just include the spring-boot-starter-data-jpa dependency in your project, and you are good to go.