The Confident Spring Professional

Learn to find your way around the Spring Ecosystem. Go from not knowing where to start to having a good understanding of Spring Framework, Spring MVC, Spring & Databases and - of course - Spring Boot, without having to fall back on constantly copying someone else's code.

"I get the job done with Spring Boot, but never understand why things work."

Sure, you can follow most beginner tutorials about Spring Boot, copy & paste some code and pump out REST services in no time.

 But after a while, doubts usually start creeping in: 

"I go to Spring's documentation, StackOverflow, other tutorials and copy & paste those code examples...however, I feel like I never really understand how things work." 

"I just slap Spring annotations on classes and then magically stuff happens in various places and times."

"I've been building applications with Spring for years and still feel lost a lot of the time."

The problem: Simple tutorials are fine for learning the basics, but they don't make you really understand how things work under the hood and the reasons behind what you do.

 I've spent the last 10 years building applications within an ever-expanding Spring ecosystem; piecing together things from every resource I could get my hands on to really understand Spring's magic; learning how all the different Spring projects and modules fit together in one big ecosystem. 

The Confident Spring Developer is the course I wish I'd had.

 Plain Java Web Apps without Spring

To understand what Spring brings to the table, you'll first learn how to write modern, minimalistic web apps with plain Java. You'll just need a couple of tools.

• Java 11(-21) and an embedded Tomcat. 
• Maven as build tool to produce an executable .jar-file, similar to Spring Boot. 

The project you build during this module is the foundation for the rest of this course.

 Spring IoC Basics

You will get a deep-dive into core Spring concepts: 

• In-depth coverage of how Spring's Dependency Injection container works and what problem it solves. 
• How Spring's environment support helps you work with properties and different stages (dev, prod). 

You will start 'springifying' the project from the previous module.

 Spring WebMVC

 After understanding core Spring concepts, it is time for you to meet Spring's web framework, called Spring WebMVC and learn how it powers literally every existing Spring Boot application. 

It's all about:

• Building JSON/XML REST services with Spring.
• Building server-side rendered, dynamic HTML pages with Spring and additional templating libraries.

 Spring & Databases

 Powering your web application with a database is the next major step. Hence, you'll learn the most popular ways of accessing and querying databases with Spring. 

• Low-level database access with JdbcTemplate, DataSources and embedded databases. 
• Higher-level database access with Spring Data JDBC.
• An introduction to database transactions with @Transactional.

 Spring Boot

After you learned the foundations of the Spring ecosystem, it is time to get a comprehensive look into Spring Boot, not just quickly build a new project with it.

• You will learn exactly how, when and why Spring Boot leverages all the core Spring concepts you learned earlier in this course to understand what opinionated Spring really means. 
• You will get a crash course of Spring Boot internals, i.e. AutoConfigurations and also build your own AutoConfigurations.