In these posts, it will not cover all Spring and Java EE features, but the following technologies will be used.
Spring framework
Spring framework is the infrastructure framework of this sample application.
It provides a lightweight IOC container and a simple POJO based programming model, and also contains lots of glue codes for Java EE specification support and popular open source framework integration.
With the benefit of Spring, it makes Java EE development without container become true, and also eases the Java EE testing. In the past years, Spring was considered as the defacto standard of Java EE development.
Spring MVC
One of the most attractive features provided in Spring framework is the Spring MVC framework, like the old Struts framework, it is a web framework based on Servlet specification, and implements the standard MVC(Model, View, Controller) patterns.
Spring MVC supports lots of view presentations, for traditional web application or RESTful APIs. In this sample application, we only use Spring MVC as the REST API producer and exposes the APIs to client.
For the traditional web development, check my samples hosted on Spring4 sandbox.
Spring Security
In a traditional Java EE application, JAAS is the specification which is responsible for Authentication and Authorization. But it is very dependent on a specific container. Although most containers include a visual web UI for user management. But if you want to manage users and roles in program way.
Spring Security fills this field, which makes the security control become easy, and provides a simple programming model. Spring Security is also compatible with JAAS specification, and provides JAAS integration at runtime.
Java EE 8 is trying to introduce a new Security specification to fix this issue.
JPA
Based on JDBC specification, JPA provides a high level ORM abstraction and brings OOP philosophy to interact with traditional RDBMS. Hibernate and EclipseLink also support NoSQL.
Hibernate
In this sample application, Hibernate is used as the JPA provider. Most of time, we are trying to avoid to use a provider specific APIs, make the codes can be run cross JPA providers.
Spring Data JPA
Spring Data JPA simplifies using JPA in Spring, including a united Repository to perform simple CRUD without coding, simplified type safe Criteria Query and QueryDSL integration, a simple auditing implementation, simple pagination support of query result, Java 8 Optional and DateTime support etc.