The Spring Framework is a de facto standard for creating Java EE applications. It is lightweight, compared to its earlier competitor, EJB (short for Enterprise JavaBeans). In his book, Expert One-on-One J2EE Development without EJB, Rod Johnson, the creator of Spring Framework, wrote the following:
And that was in 2004. He was right. In the past 16 years, since the initial release of the framework in 2002, Spring has become the first choice of frameworks that people use to build Java EE applications. And, with Spring Boot, building Spring applications has become much easier and more productive than ever before.
In this chapter, we will cover the fundamental concepts of Spring Framework 5. And you will do the following:
- Learn what Inversion of Control (IoC) and dependency injection (DI) are
- Learn Spring MVC
- Learn Spring JDBC and JAP for data accessing
- Learn aspect-oriented programming, Spring AOP, and its benefits
- Learn how Spring manages transactions
- Learn Spring Boot
Along the way, we will create the backend of the Messages App by using these technologies offered by Spring. Finally, we will integrate the frontend of the Messages App created in this chapter with this backend.