Chapter 3: The Sample Application

Overview

The examples in each chapter of this book are tailored to the current discussion and are suitably simple to prevent the example itself from clouding the issue at hand. For the most part, these examples provide a sufficient explanation for the topic they are demonstrating. That said, the examples are taken in isolation and are not based on a real-world scenario, which can make understanding how the different Spring features work together difficult. To overcome this, we built a basic blog application, SpringBlog, that highlights most of the topics discussed in this book and shows how the different Spring features work together.

You should note that this application is purposely very simple, and indeed, many of its features were conceived so we could highlight a particular piece of Spring functionality. Despite its simplicity, the SpringBlog application does demonstrate how a Spring-based application is constructed and how the components are glued together.

In this chapter, you get to take a peek at the finished SpringBlog application. We then discuss the Spring features used to implement different parts of the application. This chapter also highlights some of the decisions we made when designing the SpringBlog application and why we made them. More than anything, this chapter serves as a road map to the rest of the book, allowing you to highlight an area that is important to your own application and immediately identify where that area is covered in the book.

Specifically, this chapter covers two main topics:

Requirements of the SpringBlog application: In this section, we discuss the requirements of the SpringBlog application and sneak a peek at the finished product of these requirements. We also discuss why we chose to include certain requirements and why we ignored others when we built the sample application.

Implementing the SpringBlog application: In this section, we take a high-level look at how the requirements discussed in the previous section are implemented using Spring. This section does not go into any detail on the individual Spring features; instead, it discusses the features generally and points you to other chapters that contain more complete descriptions.

If you are already comfortable with the design of Spring applications or you already know which chapters are most important to your application, feel free to skip this chapter. If you are completely new to Spring, reading this chapter will give you a good idea of where the different Spring components fit into your applications.