What you should know - Spring Tutorial

- [Instructor] In order to be successful in this course and to get the most out of it, you should know a few things prior to taking this course. And, of course, you will need some proper software on your machine. So with that, let's level set. This course is a Java based course. So let's start there. I will be using JDK 17 as an LTS version that is supported by Spring at the current time. It makes the most sense to leverage it. Ensure you have it installed in on your path. And remember, you need a JDK, not just a JRE. Now, you won't need to know any of the new features of the language. To be honest, you should be able to just have a very base knowledge of Java, and you should be able to be successful. Now, I'm going to be using Maven as a dependency management and build tool, but Gradle is perfectly fine as well, if you feel more comfortable with that. We won't really be doing much outside of our IDE. So as long as yours supports the tool, either one is perfectly fine. And speaking of IDEs, you should have one, preferably, one that is focused on Java. Now, I'm going to be using IntelliJ Premium because I use it every day. But by no means should you go out and buy it just for this course. Most modern IDEs that work with Java support plugins for Spring and GraphQL. The most important thing is that you know how to use your IDE and you're comfortable with it. Not necessarily the one that I am using. Now, this is a Spring course. So you will need some base knowledge of Spring. I have many courses in the LinkedIn Learning library on the Spring. So if you don't know the framework, please take a pause, and go learn it by taking my Learning Spring with Spring Boot course, my Spring Boot Essential Training course, or my Spring: Framework in Depth course. We will be using the core framework. So as long as you understand inversion of control and Java config for the application context, you should be good. We'll also be using some annotation. So component scanning will come into play, but you get that free with Spring Boot. We will be using a touch of Spring Web. So if you get the basics of it, that should be sufficient, but you should understand what controllers are. We will be using Spring Data, specifically JPA with embedded databases. Now, many of my courses here on the library talk about using Spring Data with JPA, including Learning Spring with Spring Boot. So you should be familiar with it. And we have tools here if you're not. Now, if you know JPA or hibernate, you'll probably be fine. There's just a couple things that I'm going to show you that will come into play. But again, I address these as well in those other courses, if you want a little bit more depth in Spring Data. Maybe most I impactfully we will be using Spring Boot. You really need to understand not only the basics, but the core operations of Spring Boot, because we're going to leverage them to build out this course and to build out our GraphQL implementation. So make sure you understand not only how Spring works, but how Spring Boot itself works. Now, when it comes to GraphQL itself, the prerequisites are going to be minimal. You should know at a high level what it is and why people use it. Now, we're going to go into those details. But most of the discussion outside of the code in this course are going to center around GraphQL itself. So some very basic knowledge will be sufficient. Now, you will need to have a GraphQL playground. There are many ways to get one. You can install it as an application. You can use it in your browser, which is what I'm going to do. You can install it through an app. You can use your IDE plugins. It really doesn't matter how you get a GraphQL playground, just get one. If you use Google Chrome, there's some great extensions out there that allow you to run the playground. And again, that's what I'm going to use in this course in order to connect to my GraphQL API.