[SOUND] You've been introduced to the Spring framework and

you've even created a Web app that serves Web content.

That's awesome.

What I'd like to do now is start looking at one of the most subtle,

but powerful features of Spring and that is its

ability to let you use plain old Java objects to control your application.

What are these Plain Old Java Objects or POJOs for short?

A POJO is a Java object whose class is coded for

its natural functionality and not for the framework which it will be used in.

That means that the class is coded with fields, constructors, getters and

setters, and methods that are useful to the object

as it fits in with the other classes of your application.

Not because of how it fits in with the framework you've chosen, such as Spring.

We're going to see this most clearly in the way we store our GIF data

into objects.

What we'll do is write the code that models or represents a GIF.

If this phrasing is unfamiliar to you, think of it this way.

Since we'll be storing and interacting with GIFs we should have a sense of

the kinds of we want to track about our GIFs.

We'll include the following data on our first go around.

We'll include the name which will be a String,

the date uploaded which will be a local date object,

the username of the user who uploaded the GIF which will also be a String.

And finally, whether or

not this GIF is marked as a favorite which will be a Boolean value.

The class we write to represent each GIF object is referred to as a model

because it serves as a model for the objects we'll create.

Kind of like a role model serves as an example of the traits and

behaviors we'd like to practice as human beings.

Well, see this term pop up again when we discuss the model view controller

architectural pattern later on.

Let's go to our first model together, the GIF class.

Just so that we can keep all potential models organized,

I'm going to create another package called com.teamtreehouse.giflib.model.

So I'll right-click on the giflib package.

New, Package, and I'll call it model.

That'll be a package side by side with controller here.

This is the package into which we would put all data models, whether we have 1 or

even 100.

To create the model, I'll create a Java class name Gif.

Right click, New, Java Class, Gif.

Now, even though Gif is an acronym, notice that I'm not capitalizing the I or the F.

We'll reserve the all caps for class constants.

In other words, static final fields.

So I'll click enter to create the class,

then we have our blank class ready to code.

We mentioned four fields that we'd be adding here.

Name, date uploaded, username, and favorite.

So let's create those now.

The name I will use a string for.

The date uploaded, we're going to use Java 8's LocalDate object.

dateUploaded.

The username will be another string.

And the favorite will be a boolean.

Wonderful.

We'll need getters and setters for each of these fields at this point, so

let's create them.

What I'll do is use the Cmd + End keyboard shortcut to

automatically create new methods.

So I'll arrow down to Getter and Setter, hit Enter.

Then, I'll highlight all the fields by holding Shift and

arrowing down until they're all selected.

You could also do this with the mouse.

Then I'll hit Enter, and just like that, boom, they're all generated.

Pretty sweet.

If you're using Eclipse, Spring Tool Suite, which is based on Eclipse, or

even NetBeans, they all have this option of generating getters and setters.

It's a huge time saver.

And hey, let's use another IDE shortcut to generate a constructor with all fields.

So I'll put that at the top here.

Again, I'll use Cmd+N.

Hit Enter with constructor highlighted,

then highlight the fields that I want to include in the constructor as parameters.

Again, I'll highlight all of them, and hit Enter.

And just like that, our constructor's created just as we want it.

Much faster than writing all that code manually.

And that's all there is to our model class for a Gif object.

Pretty straight forward, right?

Next, we'll look at how to use the Gif model in our controller

to pass data to our timely templates.