What should I know before learning Spring? [closed]

Question

I've been learning Spring and I'm really liking what I'm learning, but feel ill-equipped to do anything at the moment. I know Java really well, I'm ok at ant, but I don't know anything about: J2EE, JSP, Servlets, Tomcat, Maven, Hibernate, JPA, and I've never made any kind of website using Java (I've made lots of applications in Java, but all websites I've made were using PHP).

Should I cement some of my knowledge of the "basics" or should I keep slogging away at Spring?

Answer 1

Spring is a monster. It all depends on what part of Spring you are interested in. A good starting point would be the Dependency Injection container, which requires none of the technologies that you are unfamiliar with (the ones from your question).

If you are interested in learning Spring MVC (which it sounds like you might be based on the technologies you mention), I would recommend learning the basics in these (again from your question):

1. Servlets
2. JSP
3. Tomcat (or another web application container)

For Spring MVC I would also look at the idea of RESTful web services.

You can find a (likely) comprehensive list of Spring projects at this link.

Answer 2

I would recommend three things:

• Lots of Reading => Spring Documentation in a Single Page

• Lots of Coding => You can start off by getting an example Spring / Hibernate project. And then use Spring Tool Suite, which includes many interactive tutorials, and template projects that just work without any coding at all.

• Find a Spring User Group next to the place you live. If there is no such group => create one!

It is totally ok that you don't know JSP / Servlets / Tomcat / J(2)EE / etc. Extremely smart people who, for example, write Linux kernel (which is a lot more complex) may not know it as well. The beauty of Spring is that going through it, and reading about best patterns and approaches you'll get all the above. No need to learn J(2)EE separately. Spring is J(2)EE of today.