Spring Boot has a funky (and interesting) way of finding out the main application class. Basically, the method throws a runtime exception, which it swallows. The exception provides a list of stack trace elements, which the method loops through to find the one point on the stack, whose method name equals to "main".

SpringApplication.java

private Class<?> deduceMainApplicationClass() {
	try {
		StackTraceElement[] stackTrace = new RuntimeException().getStackTrace();
		for (StackTraceElement stackTraceElement : stackTrace) {
			if ("main".equals(stackTraceElement.getMethodName())) {
				return Class.forName(stackTraceElement.getClassName());
			}
		}
	}
	catch (ClassNotFoundException ex) {
		// Swallow and continue
	}
	return null;
}