Coders Campus Podcast

We’ve talked about relational databases already, and we’ve learned why this type of database management really dovetails with the object oriented programming model. So now I want to dive into the specifics when it comes to relationships.

There are three types of relationships you can have in SQL, they are:

In this episode we are going to be focusing on the One-to-Many relationship as it’s the most commonly used in my opinion.

Terminology

It's the foundation when learning any new concepts.  In this episode of the "How to Program with Java Podcast" we will be talking about some new database terminology.

One of the most important aspects of modern databases is the fact that they allow you to define relationships.

Relationships between tables allow you to break data up into its individual "areas of interest".  But when you break the data up, you'll need to know how to put it back together.  This is accomplished using relationships, keys and joins.

There's plenty to learn about these concepts and we will start by scratching the surface in this episode.

Exciting Announcement

As you'll hear in the first few minutes of this episode, I've recently had an epiphone!  

I realized that there's no great communities dedicated to programmers.

So I took it upon myself to create the very first community dedicated to programmers and the pursuit of knowledge and advancement of our common goals (to excel as programmers).  You'll learn lots about this community in the episode, so I won't go in to details here, but if you're interested in checking it out - please visit:

http://coderscampus.com

This is the at the heart of all databases and SQL. A database essentially carries out these four operations over and over again for the duration of its existence.

In this podcast, I talk about these four database operations in detail and the actual syntax that is used in a flavour of SQL known as MySQL.

Ladies and gentlemen the time has come for you to start learning about Databases and SQL.

In this episode I will talk about the very basics of databases and why it is they exist in the first place.  You'll learn things like:

Learning and understanding databases is more is less a required skill in these modern days of programming, and at the very least, having knowledge about databases will give you a leg up on any competition.  So pay attention boys and girls, and strap on your thinking caps, because this ride is getting started.

AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) is a techonology used to create Rich Internet Applications (RIA).  

If you're asking "what the heck does that mean!?"  You're in the right place

In this podcast episode we will talk about the uses for AJAX and how it can lead to a much nicer web browsing experience for your Java web applications.

What else will you learn about in this episode?

An algorithm is essentially a well defined set of instructions that get carried out by a computer in an automated fashion to solve a problem.  A good example of this is to say "How would you tell a computer to figure out which of the 5 balls I've given to you is the heaviest (or lightest)".  In order to solve this "problem", you'll need to define a set of steps for the computer to carry out in order to reach a conclusion and solve the problem.

Algorithms are very common in programming, as you are constantly trying to tell the computer how to solve problems in a step by step manner.

The Big-O Notation is the way we determine how fast any given algorithm is when put through its paces.  

Consider this scenario: You are typing a search term into Google like "How to Program with Java" or "Java Video Tutorials", you hit search, and you need to wait about 30 seconds before all of the results are on the screen and ready to go...  Would you still use Google?  Or would you start shopping around with other search engines to find one that is faster?  My guess is you'd start shopping around.

Speed is everything these days, and building slow software is infuriating to users even if they aren't even paying for the software.

Ever wondered how you could properly restrict access to certain parts of your web application?  

Do you have an application that has a user registration page and a user login page?

Spring Security is the answer if you have a web application created with the Spring Framework!

Spring Security will restrict access to any URLs that point to your web application based on your custom configuration.

Learn how in this week's How to Program with Java podcast.

So, the Spring framework is a wonderful help for programmers, but sometimes it needs a bit of help.  It does a good job of trying to match fields on a webpage to Java objects (aka Java Beans), but sometimes when the "mapping" is complex, Spring needs our help.

In this episode I will explain exactly how you can go about something known as "custom binding".  This process allows you to take any text from the presentation layer and convert/bind it to the appropriate Java object (Java Bean) on the server side.

In our last episode I talked about controllers and how they are used in Spring.  In this episode I will be diving even further into Controllers in the Spring Framework and I will talk about the different parameters that can be passed into each method within each Controller.

For example, there are HttpServletRequest objects, Model objects as well as @RequestParam and @ModelAttribute annotations that can be used within your Controller's methods.  The beauty of the Spring framework is that you can pick and choose which ones you want to include within any given method.

Well, so far we've been focusing on a bunch of topics that align themselves around the Java programming language in general.  But now we're going to take things into a slightly new direction, we're going to be talking about the Spring Framework -- more specifically, Controllers and the Spring Framework.

You see, my goal for this blog and podcast has been to not only teach you the Java programming language, but also teach you how you can build a web application.  So, this is the first step in that direction.