To handle an exception thrown by a specific method in a controller, you should use the @ExceptionHandler annotation on a method within that controller. This annotation allows you to specify methods that will handle exceptions thrown by other methods in the same controller class. It's a way to have fine-grained control over how exceptions are handled within a specific controller.

To synchronize the cache across multiple instances of a Spring Boot application in a distributed environment, you can use a distributed cache solution like Redis or Hazelcast. These tools provide distributed caching capabilities that keep cache data consistent across instances. The other options do not provide a robust and efficient solution for cache synchronization in a distributed environment.

The @DataJpaTest annotation in Spring Boot is used to test interactions with the database. It disables full auto-configuration and applies only JPA-related configurations, allowing you to focus on testing data access components.

To ensure the correctness of interactions between beans and the expected outcomes of complex business logic, you should use unit tests to verify the behavior of individual beans and integration tests to verify interactions between beans. This approach allows you to isolate and test individual components as well as their interactions. Skipping interactions or testing only the final outcome is not sufficient for comprehensive testing. Manual testing for bean interactions is not a scalable or reliable approach for complex applications.

To ensure that the ApplicationContext is not loaded while performing unit testing on web layers, you should use the @WebMvcTest annotation. This annotation is specifically designed for testing Spring MVC components and doesn't load the full application context.

To implement a feature in a Spring Boot application where the response body is customized based on client preference, you should use content negotiation with @RequestMapping annotations. This allows Spring Boot to handle client preferences automatically. Option 2 is the recommended approach as it promotes clean and efficient code. The other options may require more manual coding and could be less maintainable.

In Spring Boot, the Multi interface is used to represent a reactive stream that emits multiple items. The Multi type is a reactive type that can emit zero or more items, making it suitable for scenarios where you expect multiple values to be emitted over time. This is part of the reactive programming model in Spring Boot, allowing you to work with sequences of data in a reactive manner.

To isolate the test context for a specific part of a Spring Boot application, such as a web layer, you can use the @WebMvcTest annotation. It will configure a minimal Spring application context with only the components needed for testing the web layer.

In Spring Boot, when developing reactive applications, the @RestController annotation is used to define a reactive controller. This annotation is similar to the traditional @Controller annotation but is enhanced to support reactive programming. A class annotated with @RestController will handle incoming requests in a non-blocking, reactive way, allowing you to build responsive and scalable applications.

In Spring Boot, the @WebMvcTest annotation allows you to focus only on the web layer while testing. It loads only the necessary components for testing the controllers and does not load the complete application context, making tests more focused and faster.