Spring and Spring Boot Fundamentals

Overview

The adoption of Spring as a Java enterprise framework in recent years has been phenomenal. More and more companies are relying on technologies from the Spring ecosystem, which has grown immensely over the years. Unfortunately, with the pace, the focus on fundamentals has been lost, resulting in basic parts of the framework only being used but not really understood. This workshop aims to remedy this and make the basics of Spring and Spring Boot understandable. With a good understanding of these basics, your everyday life with Spring will be much easier, both during development and in error situations. Also, familiarizing yourself with more advanced technologies from the Spring universe will be much easier, since they are mostly based on the simple basics of Spring framework.

Content

• Spring Basics
  • Dependency Injection
  • Beans
  • Bean Stereotypes
  • Bean Scopes
  • Profiles and Conditions
  • Configuration
  • Application Context Summary
• Spring Web / MVC
• Spring Boot
  • What is Spring Boot?
  • Hands-on Session 1
  • Starters
  • Auto Configuration
  • Profiles, Properties and Externalized Configuration
  • Hands-on Session 2

Objectives

• Understand the basic concepts of Spring Framework and Spring Boot.
• Demystify the "magic" behind Spring and Spring Boot.
• Know the difference between Spring Framework and Spring Boot.

Target Audience

• Software Enthusiasts
• Software Engineers
• Software Architects

Prerequisites

• You should have good Java skills. You have ideally even worked with Spring or another enterprise framework before or are planning to use it in a project soon.
• Laptop with internet access. In particular, it should be possible to access GitHub, MavenCentral and start.spring.io. The following should be pre-installed on this laptop:
  • JDK 17 or newer
  • Java IDE (IntelliJ, Eclipse, ...) of your choice
  • Optional: Git, Gradle or Maven

Preparation

Basically, there is only one thing you can prepare: Create a SpringBoot Project in your IDE. There are multiple options to achieve this:

• If you are familiar with start.spring.io, it is the most straightforward.
• If you use IntelliJ, you can use this guide to create the project.
• Alternatively, depending on your preferred build tool, you can simply check out one of the following repos I've prepared for you. After checking out, it would be useful to build the project (Maven: mvn install, Gradle: gradlew build) to verify that it is working correctly.
  • https://github.com/spring-fundamentals/spring-fundamentals-start-gradle
  • https://github.com/spring-fundamentals/spring-fundamentals-start-maven