Creating a modular and reactive database access layer for Spring

This is our first event for 2021, after 4 events in 2020, and we are glad to start this year with Michael Simons with a very interesting talk about creating a modular and reactive database access layer for Spring.

Michael Simons is a father, husband and athlete (the later is probably just wishful thinking).

Michael is also a Java Champion, published author, JUG leader and currently working on Spring Data and Neo4j-OGM at Neo4j.

In this role, his main focus is providing first class support of Neo4j in the Spring Environment, but he also made contributions to Testcontainers, Spring Boot, Quarkus and a lot of other projects.

Michael writes regular about Java, Software Architecture and live in general on https://info.michael-simons.eu

In this talk Michael will show us how the Neo4j team redesigned Spring Data Neo4j from scratch so that users have a modular, data access layer.

They wanted to provide users options that behave like lego bricks:

• a pure and simple database connection as the foundation
• a client that is integrated with Spring transactions
• an Object mapping framework that understands your domain
• added benefit on top of that in the form of DAO’s aka repositories

We are gonna speak briefly about Neo4j and what a graph database is.

Then we start with Spring Boot, it’s starters and autoconfiguration: Is this magic or „just" a very intelligent way of configuring things when they are available?
Why is the later important? Because it’s the hook where we start the journey with the goal outlined above.

Step by step we are gonna work our way into the Spring Data Commons framework from there on.

With a high probability we're gonna hear about a couple of Michael's personal milestones and how it happened that he started out as an in-house Java developer to become Spring Boot contributor and eventually an Open Source project maintainer.