As a web developer, I like to create new things, put them online quickly, and move on to my next idea.
In a world where all our applications are connected to each other, we need to interact with social media to promote our products and complex systems, to provide great value for our users.
Until recently, all this was a distant and complicated world for Java developers. With the birth of Spring Boot and the democratization of cloud platforms, we can now create amazing applications and make them available to everyone in record time, without spending a penny.
In this book, we will build a useful web application from scratch. An application with a lot of neat features, such as internationalization, form validation, distributed sessions and caches, social login, multithreaded programming, and many more.
Also, we will test it completely.
By the end of this book, we will have published our little application and made it available on the Web.
If this sounds like fun to you, let's not waste any more time and get our hands on the code!
Chapter 1, Setting Up a Spring Web Application in No Time, gets us started with Spring Boot really quickly. It covers the tools that will make us more productive, such as Spring Tool Suite and Git. It will also help us to scaffold our application in a snap and see the magic behind Spring boot.
Chapter 2, Mastering the MVC Architecture, guides us through creating a small Twitter search engine. It covers the basics of Spring MVC and the principles of web architecture along the way.
Chapter 3, Handling Forms and Complex URL Mapping, helps you understand how you can create a user profile form. It covers how to validate our data on the server, as well as on the client, and make our application available in different languages.
Chapter 4, File Upload and Error Handling, guides you through adding file upload to your profile form. It demonstrates handling errors properly in a Spring MVC and displaying custom error pages.
Chapter 5, Crafting a RESTful Application, explains the principles of a RESTful architecture. It also helps us to create a user management API accessible through HTTP calls, see which tools can help us design this API, and talks about how we can document it easily.
Chapter 6, Securing Your Application, guides us through securing our application. It covers how we can secure our RESTful API with basic HTTP authentication and our web pages behind a login page. It demonstrates how to enable login via Twitter and store our session on a Redis server to allow our application to scale.
Chapter 7, Leaving Nothing to Luck – Unit Tests and Acceptance Tests, helps us test our application. It discusses testing and TDD, and covers how to unit test our controllers and use modern libraries to design end-to-end tests. It finishes with how Groovy can improve our productivity and the readability of our tests.
Chapter 8, Optimizing Your Requests, takes us through optimizing our application. It covers how to use cache-control and Gzipping. This chapter teaches you how to cache our Twitter search results in-memory and on Redis, and shows you how to multithread the search. As a bonus, implementing Etags and using WebSockets is also covered.
Chapter 9, Deploying Your Web Application to the Cloud, guides us through publishing our application. It shows how the different PaaS solutions can be compared to each other. Then, it demonstrates how to deploy the application on both Cloud Foundry and Heroku.
Chapter 10, Beyond Spring Web, discusses the Spring ecosystem in general, what modern web applications are made of, and where to go from there.
Although we will build a cutting-edge web application, we do not require you to install a lot of things.
The application that we will build requires Java 8.
You are not forced to, but you definitely should use Git to version control your project. It will be needed if you want to deploy your application on Heroku. Moreover, you will be able to back up your work easily and see the code evolve with the diffs and history. A couple of resources to get started with Git are provided in the first chapter.
I also recommend that you use a good IDE. We will see how to get started quickly with Spring Tool Suite (for free) and IntelliJ Idea (you can obtain a one month trial).
If you have a Mac, you should check Homebrew (http://brew.sh). With this package manager, you can install any tool used in this book.
This book is perfect for developers who are familiar with the fundamentals of Spring programming and are eager to expand their web development skills. Prior knowledge of the Spring framework is recommended.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "You will find the JAR in the directory build/libs."
A block of code is set as follows:
public class ProfileForm {
private String twitterHandle;
private String email;
private LocalDate birthDate;
private List<String> tastes = new ArrayList<>();
// getters and setters
}When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
public class ProfileForm {
private String twitterHandle;
private String email;
private LocalDate birthDate;
private List<String> tastes = new ArrayList<>();
// getters and setters
}Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ curl https://start.spring.io
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Go to the new project menu and select the Spring Initializr project type ".
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