Part 3. Spring in the back end

Although the web pages served by a web application are all your users ever see, the real work happens behind the scenes on the back end server where data is processed and persisted. Part 3 will look at how Spring can help you work with data in the back end.

Relational databases have been the workhorse of enterprise applications for decades. In chapter 10, “Hitting the database with Spring and JDBC,” you’ll see how to use Spring’s JDBC abstraction to query relational databases in a way that is far simpler than native JDBC.

If JDBC is not your style, perhaps you’d rather work with an object-relational mapping (ORM) framework. Chapter 11, “Persisting data with object-relational mapping,” will show you how Spring integrates with ORM frameworks such as Hibernate and other implementations of the Java Persistence API (JPA). In addition, you’ll see how to work magic with Spring Data JPA, automatically generating repository implementations on the fly at runtime.

Relational databases aren’t always a perfect fit. Therefore, chapter 12, “Working with NoSQL databases,” looks at other Spring data projects useful for persisting data in a variety of nonrelational databases, including MongoDB, Neo4j, and Redis.

Chapter 13, “Caching data,” layers the previous persistence chapters with caching, to improve application performance by avoiding the database altogether if the data needed is readily available.