Introduction to Web Application Development

Hello Everyone,

How are you guys doing? I hope and pray almighty Allah that whoever reading this article and people all over the world should be in good health in these challenging times of the Pandemic. I am excited to start one more learning series on Web Application Development in java powered by Spring Boot. As part of this series, we are going to learn how to develop a complete modern Web Application using Java powered by Spring Boot. In episode 1, we are going to learn the below things.

1) What is the Web?

2) What is Web Application Development?

3) What is Web Application Development in Java?

4) What is Web Application Development in Java powered by Spring Boot?

So let's get started with our opening episode.

1) What is the Web?

In simple terms, The World Wide Web(WWW) is commonly known as the Web, it is a giant information system on the internet. But, to truly understand what the web is, you should understand what problem does Web solves and the story behind it? I highly recommend going over the below link to know about the problems which led to the invention of the Web.

https://webfoundation.org/about/vision/history-of-the-web/

2) What is Web Application Development?

In simple terms, it means developing and building WebSites, Applications, Services that communicate with each other over the Web. There are many individual components involved in Web Application Development like Web Browsers(Chrome, Firefox, Edge), Load balancers, Servers(Web, Application, File, Database, Security, Mail) and etc, but on a high level, we majorly have the below 3 components.

• Client Component - Requests Information.
• HTTP Component - Medium through with Request-Response Travels.
• Server Component - Receives, Process, and Respond Back to Client Requests.

3) What is Web Application Development in Java?

When we talk about Web Application Development in java, we're talking about solving the problems and building the components of web development using Java. That means when a user submits data to our website, we will use Java to process it. When a user requests a web page from the server, we will use Java to render it.

4) What is Web Application Development in Java powered by Spring Boot?

• Spring Boot is part of the Spring framework, an umbrella project that encompasses many powerful Java libraries for web development.
• Spring includes 24 high-level industry-standard solutions for essential components of web development, such as database access, security, cloud deployment, web services, and more. Spring Boot is a library meant for rapid application development and gives us many of spring's core libraries with minimal configuration.
• Well, in any web development scenario, we have three main components to identify.

1. Data Storage Component:- How the data is stored?
2. Application Logic Component:- What kind of service provides the logic for your application?
3. Client Access Component:- What type of client accesses the service?

• With plain Java, we would have to set up a database server, write some servlets code to process HTTP requests, and render a website using a database driver to access and update the database. The serverlet code we write would provide the logic of the application as well as the client in the form of rendering the website, bottom line we need to write lots and lots of boilerplate code.
• With spring, the solution to all of these is actually just a Spring Boot application. For our application logic, we'll write many small spring components called beans, or sometimes services, which are just Java classes that spring knows about. These beans can take advantage of spring's vast array of libraries to perform tasks like database access and HTML template rendering. Most importantly, spring allows us to create networks of dependencies between beans, which means we can write single-purpose components that rely on each other to perform complex tasks.
• So we as a Web Application Development Team delegate/outsource all the supporting technology required to develop Application logic to Spring boot and just concentrate on developing Application logic in java to solve the Business Problem at Hand.

I would like to conclude episode 1of our Season 1 here, stay tuned for episode 2.

References

1. https://www.udacity.com/course/java-developer-nanodegree--nd035
2. https://webfoundation.org/about/vision/history-of-the-web/
3. https://spring.io/

Disclaimer

This article is governed by the "Fair Use" doctrine and is only for purpose such as criticism, comment & teaching.

Note:- This is a living article.