1.4.3 Spring Data

Although the core Spring Framework comes with basic data persistence support, Spring Data provides something quite amazing: the ability to define your application’s data repositories as simple Java interfaces, using a naming convention when defining methods to drive how data is stored and retrieved.

What’s more, Spring Data is capable of working with several different kinds of databases, including relational (via JDBC or JPA), document (Mongo), graph (Neo4j), and others. You’ll use Spring Data to help create repositories for the Taco Cloud application in chapter 3.