The Spring-Boot Crash Course

Intro

This course is everything you need to get started with Spring-Boot framework in Java, which is the most popular JVM-based web framework for building microservices and backend systems, used by many big-tech companies.

Java is a really great language and provides a number of features out of the box, but if you want to build a REST API in pure Java, it might not be so straight-forward.

For this reason, developers have created frameworks that allows you to build APIs fast, with best-practices in terms of code design and performance/efficiency, and Spring-Boot is such a great framework.

Why do you need to learn Spring-Boot Framework?

Spring-Boot is so popular because of the following:

• It allows you to create create production-grade applications very fast

• It promotes a well designed code-base

• It integrates with external systems seamlessly

• It has a big open source community that constantly improves it

• And many other reasons

Having Spring-Boot in your skillset as a Java developer, will allow you to:

• Be more competitive in the job market

• Be more productive because you'll read and write code faster (and better) by recognising and applying well-established design patterns embedded into Spring-Boot

• Be able to tackle more technical opportunities since many open source projects use Spring-Boot

Overall, this framework will take you a step further in your Software Engineering career and learning it as soon as possible is probably one of the best strategic moves that you can do for developing your technical expertise.

What you will learn in this course

This course is about 1 hour long, but be aware that it is jam-packed with information. In a nutshell, in this course we're going to create a plain REST API that interacts with a MySQL database to store user data, and also with an external HTTP API, to grab some external data.

A non-exhaustive list of things you're going to learn in this course is the following:

• What is Spring-Boot and how it compares to a traditional command-line Java application

• How can you import Spring-Boot framework in an empty IntelliJ Idea project

• How can you find the right Spring dependencies on the web

• How can you create a REST Controller and receive some data via HTTP

• How can you configure your REST Controller to send data back and follow best practices

• How can you create Services in Spring-Boot

• How to use Spring-Configuration mechanism

• What is Dependency Injection and how does it work

• How can you call an external API via HTTP from your application, using a HTTP Client

• How can you configure the Jackson deserialization to extract only the data you need

• How can you create and configure a MySQL database using Docker

• How can you configure a Spring-Boot application to connect and interact with the MySQL database

• How can you use Transactions in Spring-Boot to ensure atomic operations on the database

This course is meant to guide you through this framework by showcasing how can you build a simple application that connects to other 2 systems, from an end-to-end perspective. It's highly practical, because this is the best way to learn any new technology, by playing with it as much as possible

To set the right expectations: this is not a complete Spring-Boot course, it doesn't cover all possible configurations and dependencies that Spring-Boot provides. Instead, it's a course highly focused on building an application similar to a microservice, and the main goal is to give you a taste on how Spring-Boot looks as a web framework and what is the developer experience for using it.

Prerequisites for this course

This course is addressed to beginner Java Developers, Computer Science/Engineering students, existing developers that want to learn something new and of course, to anyone who wants to learn Spring-Boot.

The only prerequisites for this course are the following:

• IntellIJ IDEA community (free) edition

• Basic Java knowledge (classes, interfaces, generics)

• Willingness to learn :-)

In the last 2 lectures I'm going to use a terminal and Docker, so if you are familiar with those it will be easier to follow along, but they're not required as I'm explaining any command that I run step-by step.

Thank you for being here and let's jump in the first lecture!