What is the purpose of the @Component annotation?

@Component marks a plain Java class as a candidate for auto-detection during component scanning, so Spring registers it as a bean without any explicit @Bean method or XML entry. It's the most generic stereotype annotation in the framework.

@Component
public class SlugGenerator {
    public String slugify(String input) {
        return input.toLowerCase().replace(" ", "-");
    }
}

When @ComponentScan (added automatically by @SpringBootApplication) scans the package tree, it finds every class annotated with @Component or one of its specializations - @Service, @Repository, @Controller - and registers each as a singleton bean by default, ready to be injected wherever it's needed.

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