HackYourFutureBelgium / java

see the Master Classes Guide for more context

Java

Learning Goals

The students can:

• Create a console based functional application;
• Manage external dependencies using Maven;
• Use Unit Testing to verify system behavior;
• Create a professional web application using Spring Boot;

Open topics

• What else should we add to the Masterclass?
• Order of the topics. Might want to move up testing before dependency management or even all the way to the front (learning by writing unit tests)

Topics

Base Java and Object Oriented Programming

Introduction of the base concepts in Java

• What is the JVM?
• How is Java different from JavaScript? (Assuming previous experience of some students)?
• What IDEs exist? (Teaching Note: I see a great opportunity here to first use JShell, then move on)
• Code structures (If/else, for, etc.)
• Object oriented Programming

Open topics:

• What IDE to use? (IntelliJ / VSCode / Eclipse)
• How do we differentiate between starters and alumni of the Javascript/Node Bootcamp?

Dependency management

Just like there is NPM for Javascript, there a better ways to handle dependencies than to just "copy-paste" dependencies into your project.

• How are applications packaged in Java?
• Where to find dependencies?
• How can we Automatically download and include dependencies with Maven?
• How to use Maven to create your own packages?

Open topics:

• How deep do we want to get into building with Maven?
• Maven VS Gradle

Testing

Making sure your code works before we ship it is important. In this module we'll discuss

• Testing Pyramid
• Why do unit testing?
• Writing tests with JUnit
• The 3 A's (Arrange/Act/Assert)
• Handling difficult to test code with Mockito (Mocks and stubs)

Open topics:

• Is TDD going too far?

Spring Boot

• What is Spring?
• What is Spring Boot?
• What is Dependency Injection / IoC?
• How do we create a REST API?
• How do we connect to other APIs?
• How can we connect to a database?
• Testing in Spring

Open topics:

• I'm not to sure about the scoping here since Spring can be quite a lot to learn (Data/Cloud/Monitoring/etc.). Even connecting to a SQL database implies knowledge of JPA (which is not handled before).

Resources

• Introduction Java Course by Angie Jones: https://testautomationu.applitools.com/java-programming-course
• Spring Boot (slides for lessons in a classroom, should still update these) by Tom Cools: https://tomcools.be/pdf/AP-Spring-Session.pdf