Matt RaibleMatt Raible is a Web Developer and Java Champion. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

The Angular Mini-Book The Angular Mini-Book is a guide to getting started with Angular. You'll learn how to develop a bare-bones application, test it, and deploy it. Then you'll move on to adding Bootstrap, Angular Material, continuous integration, and authentication.

Spring Boot is a popular framework for building REST APIs. You'll learn how to integrate Angular with Spring Boot and use security best practices like HTTPS and a content security policy.

For book updates, follow @angular_book on Twitter.

The JHipster Mini-Book The JHipster Mini-Book is a guide to getting started with hip technologies today: Angular, Bootstrap, and Spring Boot. All of these frameworks are wrapped up in an easy-to-use project called JHipster.

This book shows you how to build an app with JHipster, and guides you through the plethora of tools, techniques and options you can use. Furthermore, it explains the UI and API building blocks so you understand the underpinnings of your great application.

For book updates, follow @jhipster-book on Twitter.

10+ YEARS


Over 10 years ago, I wrote my first blog post. Since then, I've authored books, had kids, traveled the world, found Trish and blogged about it all.

[NFJS Denver] Bruce Tate and Intro to Spring

I decided to stay in the same room after Dave Thomas's talk and attend Bruce Tate's talk on Intro to Spring. After looking through the slides, I realized that its possible I won't learn anything new - but I think I'll stick around for a 1/2 hour or so - just to hear Bruce talk. At the beginning of his presentation, he asked if anyone has downloaded Spring. Hmmm - I'm the only one in a room of about 35. Bruce then mentioned Spring books coming out in the next few months. Damn, he didn't mention Spring Live - I guess I have some more marketing to do! Bruce calls Spring's ApplicationContext a "container", but it's not really a container, but a "dictionary of instantiated objects." That sounds like a good definition to me. Spring's mission statements, or basic beliefs:

  • J2EE should be easier to use
  • It's best to program to interfaces, rather than classes. Spring reduces the complexity cost of using interfaces to zero.
  • JavaBeans offer a great way of configuring applications
  • OO design is more important than any implementation technology, such as J2EE.
  • Checked exceptions are overused in Java. A framework shouldn't force you to catch exceptions you're unlikely to be able to recover from.
  • Testability is essential, and a framework such as Spring should help make your code easier to test.

I've been working with Spring for long enough that I've actually forgot about how much easier my J2EE development life is. This session is a good reminder of how cool Spring is. Poor suckers in this room - no one is even using it. Bruce is a good speaker - and looks quite a bit younger in real life (than in his pictures).

OK, I'm outta here - time to go learn some more about CVS. Note to self - talk to Bruce and figure out how he modified JUnit's excluded.properties file. He had to do this a few weeks back in order to get Hibernate's EHCache working with Spring in JUnit tests. I was able to replicate his issue, but never solved it myself.

Posted in Java at May 21 2004, 05:28:09 PM MDT 4 Comments
Comments:

Rod Johnson did mention your book during his Spring sessions at TSS, it was also mentioned during the Spring BOF.

Posted by Ed Hill on May 22, 2004 at 02:09 AM MDT #

Was there any mention of how Spring is going to merge in to the sector driven market place? Most sectors seem to stumble on this stuff by accident and it amazes me that folks miss this side of marketing. Or am I missing something.

Posted by Jason Bell on May 22, 2004 at 09:51 AM MDT #

What do you mean by "sector driven market place?" Regardless of what you mean, I don't believe there was any mention of this. If you can elaborate - I can surely ask in another session. There's quite a few on Spring this weekend.

Posted by Matt Raible on May 22, 2004 at 01:55 PM MDT #

From Jason in an e-mail reply to this post:

<p style="margin-left: 40px; padding: 5px; border: 1px solid silver; background: #eee"> My concern with most of these sorts of things is that the focus is on the developer and what it can do for them.  There is never any real focus on what Spring can do to the industry, whether that be the Java industry, real estate, pharmaceuticals... whatever.

At the end of the day you have to convice a board member of a company somewhere along the line that chaging from one whizzy technology to another is going to be worth the effort.  I can see the first question from the board already, "Well Jase, you told us three months ago that Struts was going to solve all our problems, now you are saying Spring is better?"

What I would tell a board member is that using Spring will reduce time-to-market. Using Spring, it'll be easier for developers to deliver their projects on time and under budget. Spring simplifies J2EE development, and since it focuses on testability - this will likely result in higher-quality code. As for Spring vs. Struts - I would leverage the existing investment in Struts and not replace Struts with Spring's MVC framework. The can co-exist very nicely with each other. In fact, in the talk yesterday, not a single person was interested in Spring's MVC framework and most were using Struts.

Another reason to use Spring over something like EJBs is because your applications will be more portable. If you use a Spring+Hibernate solution, you can easily port your app to many database and many appservers. If you've designed your application correctly, you shouldn't need to change <em>any</em> application code. I'll admit that EJB is supposed to bring the same thing to the table, but we all know that EJBs are rarely portable across appservers. Even if they are, you usually have to dig into the JAR and change the deployment descriptor.

Posted by Matt Raible on May 22, 2004 at 04:11 PM MDT #

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