Hi my dear reader. Long time no see. Last time you’ve heard from me, I was moving to Spring, in order to have a new perspective in development and explore different business sectors. You can find the story here.
It has been weeks with no update, so here I am, delivering you one. In this post, I will talk about how my journey with the framework is going, and also my observations about its stance in the industry.
First things first, let’s talk about the learning process. It is great learning such new things. Configuration files, custom annotations, etc… I can’t wait for the day to turn to night, so I can dig in more and more. So far, I have learned absolute minimum someone needs to move on with the children projects of Spring framework. This includes:
- What Spring framework is about
- Using Spring platform
- How to install and connect Tomcat 9 with Eclipse
- Including Spring .jar files to the Java class path in order to use it
- Inversion of Control with Spring
- Dependency Injection with Spring (Constructor, Setter, and Literal injection)
- XML Configuration
- Annotation-based Configuration
- Spring bean scopes
- Spring bean lifecycle
As you see, I’ve learned the bare minimum for someone to move on with Spring framework to actually create working pet projects. Then, I moved on with Spring MVC to actually deliver something for me. Delivering working websites actually surged my enthusiasm about the framework, and ignited a fire within me. I’m not even using a build manager like Maven etc. right now. There will be a time for that also.
As I say, I’m learning Spring MVC right now. AND I’M ABSOLUTELY LOVING IT! It is so easy to develop controllers, and it is so easy to deploy back-end software thanks to it. So far, this is what I’ve learned about Spring MVC:
- How does it work?
- Creating controllers and views
- How does component scanning work
- How to read HTML form data
- Adding data to Spring model
- How to bind request params
- The JSP form tags
- Text fields
- Drop-down lists
- Radio buttons
- Checkboxes
My personal development experience plan
And I’m developing silly shit in every step just to keep myself going. As huge bullet points, this is what I’m planning to learn after that point to move on from Spring MVC:
- Form validation
- Validation with regex
- Form validation with custom rules.
Then I will move to learning Hibernate integrated with MySQL (because this is the RDBMS that I’m most familiar with). I’ll learn about Hibernate CRUD apps, and advance mappings with it.
At that point, I will be ready to develop a Spring MVC + Hibernate CRUD app with the information I’ve gathered. I’m not sure if I ever will deploy that to Heroku or something, but I will definitely publish the code at my github page, which is here.
Then I will move on with Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP). New paradigms are always fun to grab, and I cannot wait for one more!
After developing sloppy codes with .jar files of Spring projects, I will learn how to use Maven. After that point, my plans are a bit more blur. I’m planning to learn Spring Security, Spring REST, and finally the nectar of gods: Spring boot. I will try to develop pet projects about all those, but cannot be sure the order and the timeline about those.
However, learning is cool, and sharing makes it cooler. Please drop a comment kindly, if you got something to say, or make any suggestion.
Anyways, it was great to share my experience with this perfect framework. See you in my next post!
