Spring is an ecosystem that facilitates the development of JVM-based enterprise applications. And this is achieved using various modules provided by Spring. One of them, called Spring-core, is the heart of the framework in the Spring ecosystem, which provides support for dependency injection, web application, data access, transaction management, testing, and others.  

In this chapter, we will start from scratch and use Spring Framework to develop a simple application. Familiarity with Spring Framework is not required and we will see to it that by the end of the chapter you should be confident enough to use Spring Framework. 

The following are the topics covered in this chapter:

• Introduction to the application
• Understanding the database structure
• Understanding the World Bank API
• Designing the wireframes
• Creating an empty application
• Defining the model classes
• Defining the data access layer
• Defining the API controllers
• Deploying to Tomcat
• Defining the view controllers
• Defining the views