So you have your amazing mobile or web application. It’s chugging along, and it’s actually beginning to gain a userbase. In fact, your Node.js/Rails/Django/whatever framework is buzzing about Silicon Valley backend is creaking and overwhelmed by demand. What’s more, as your application changes, you’re beginning to realize that your unit tests are growing exponentially as you implement more features and fix the ones you already had.
Maybe it’s time for a rewrite.
I’m proposing a course in the most popular middleware/backend architecture out there: Java Platform, Enterprise Edition.
In this course, we will discuss:
- What an application server is, and why we use them
- The finer points of dependency injection and what that means to you
- Database interactions with the Java Persistence API
- Implementing REST services with JAX-RS
- Design patterns commonly used with JavaEE
- The use of mocking frameworks to produce useful unit tests
- How to handle integration tests and incorporate them into your build process.
- Building, testing, and deploying with Gradle
In this course, we will not discuss:
- AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBeans. Who cares? That’s a part of the Spring Framework, not JavaEE. You aren’t going to need that.
- Front-end testing. Yes, it’s important. But we’re middleware. I will presume you know how to use Selenium. We will briefly discuss incorporating it into your build process–quality engineering and continuous deployment are very good things, and you will want to take advantage of them.
- Java Server Pages. That’s a bit old hat these days. Most people just write a Javascript frontend that can call REST services anyway.
- Java Message Service. The time may come when you’re using multiple servers to handle individual business logic bits. That time is not now. In fact, I only know of five developers that know anything about JMS or who have worked with it professionally. Yes, I’m one of them. I will discuss the times you may find JMS useful, but I won’t go into its use.