My Spring Journey: Introduction
I started getting back into Java this year. A mentor recommended that I work with the Java Spring framework. To familiarize myself with Spring, I did what I normally do when I want to learn a new code related — I looked for an example of a simple functioning Spring application on Github. The first project I found seems to be the essential introductory application to Spring — Spring Petclinic. Apparently Spring Petclinic dates back to the beginning of the Spring framework. I take it that there are many more possibilities for Spring than are demonstrated in Spring Petclinic, but I read that the Spring community still has a soft spot for Spring Petclinic.
Soundtrack: Rewak vs. Blinkhorn, “Wallaby”
After launching and playing around with the application locally, I opened Spring Petclinic in InteliJ IDEA to get a better sense of the project structure. At its core, Spring Petclinic seems to be broken into five packages: model, owner, system, vet, and visit. Within model, there are BaseEntity.java, NamedEntity.java, and Person.java classes. The other four packages also have Java classes in them, and there seems to be a good logic to the inheritance in the project.
Spring Petclinic gave me a good glimpse into what a Java Spring application looks like under the hood, and I’ve started modeling my first Java Spring application, Beat Browser, off of it. Stay tuned for more posts on My Spring journey and please excuse my Java Spring naiveté along the way.