> i.e Download IntelliJ, select Spring Boot, follow prompts to create project, press green button to run app. Click link in build output to open in browser, edi

> i.e Download IntelliJ, select Spring Boot, follow prompts to create project, press green button to run app. Click link in build output to open in browser, edit files for live reload. You're right, they are now at the same point in terms of ease of development. Deployment is close too (fat jar vs php files), though PHP still has shared hosting. And sure, Spring boot has more things that vanilla PHP.