Spring Boot Learning Roadmap
Beginner Level Core Basics
Introduction to Spring Framework
- What is Spring Framework?
- Spring vs Spring Boot vs Spring MVC
Getting Started with Spring Boot
- Setting up development environment (IDE, Maven/Gradle)
- Creating a simple Spring Boot application
- Project structure and application.properties / application.yml
Spring Boot Annotations
- @SpringBootApplication
- @RestController, @RequestMapping, @GetMapping, etc.
- @Autowired, @Component, @Service, @Repository
Spring Boot DevTools
- Hot reloading
- Auto restart features
Intermediate Level Building Applications
Spring Boot with REST API
- Creating RESTful APIs
- Path variables, query parameters
- JSON request/response handling
Data Access with Spring Data JPA
- JPA, Hibernate basics
- Entity classes and repositories
- CRUD operations
- Query methods (findByName, @Query)
Spring Boot Learning Roadmap
Database Configuration
- Connecting to MySQL/PostgreSQL
- In-memory DB (H2) for testing
- application.properties configuration
Validation
- Bean validation with @Valid, @NotNull, @Size
- Custom validators
Exception Handling
- @ControllerAdvice and @ExceptionHandler
- Custom error responses
Spring Boot Profiles
- Using @Profile for dev/test/prod environments
- Profile-specific properties
Advanced Level Production Readiness
Spring Security
- Basic auth, role-based access
- JWT (JSON Web Token) authentication
- Securing REST endpoints
Spring Boot with Frontend
- Serving static content
- Integrating with React/Angular/Vue
Logging and Monitoring
- Logging with Logback, SLF4J
- Spring Boot Actuator for health and metrics
Spring Boot Learning Roadmap
Testing in Spring Boot
- Unit testing with JUnit and Mockito
- Integration testing with @SpringBootTest
API Documentation with Swagger
- Swagger UI
- OpenAPI Specification
Scheduling Tasks
- @Scheduled for background jobs
- Cron expressions
Caching
- Using @Cacheable, @CacheEvict
- Integrating with EhCache or Redis
Expert Level Microservices & DevOps
Spring Boot Microservices
- Introduction to Microservices architecture
- REST communication between services (Feign, RestTemplate, WebClient)
Spring Cloud (Optional for Microservices)
- Eureka (Service Discovery)
- Spring Cloud Config
- API Gateway (Zuul or Spring Cloud Gateway)
- Circuit Breaker with Resilience4j or Hystrix
Dockerizing Spring Boot
- Dockerfile for Spring Boot
- Docker Compose
Spring Boot Learning Roadmap
Deploying Spring Boot Applications
- WAR vs JAR
- Deployment on Tomcat, AWS, or Heroku