Peter Rooke

Serverless Spring from Pivotal; Spring Pivotal FaaS

Personally, I'm still trying to get my head around server less computing with AWS and their Lambda's architecture.  

There are some good introduction tutorials here;

https://spring.io/guides/gs/rest-service/

This is more spring boot, which is just a framework built on top of spring.  It takes an augmented approach offering default configurations for many services / utilities which are typically used.

Not sure what you mean by "pure REST", as I don't think there is any standard for REST web services (which is actually quite good).  Spring just extends Spring-MVC to offer REST services.    

Spring offers a template JDBC Template which aims to simplify JDBC code and helps with all of those horrid checked exceptions.  The template pattern is used quite a lot throughout the spring framework, so its worth knowing...   However as stated above - you may just want to use JPA or even Spring Data.

The Spring Docs give a good overview of Transaction management which could be used with JDBC or JPA if the underling resource supports it (typically a database).  

"They" already have in a way, with everyone using smart phones and the constant out of hours emails and messages!  
Saying its for "security";

“These companies have sensitive documents they are dealing with. [The chips] would allow them to set restrictions for whoever.”

But I suspect it's a cheap option, rather than hiring people who understand how to secure assets.  
Also it does not surprise me that it's the UK based banks who are wanting to do this!

Not for me never; over their dead bodies ;-)

I did the course from Pivotal (which I recommend).  Used the certification guide as a reference to guide my studies, together with one of the best sources of information the spring docs from Pivotal.  
The issue is that the exam covered a lot of technologies that are not always used in standard application development.  
I've not read the core spring developer book but have read the enterprise certification book from the same publisher and found it a good source of information.    

RMI as a technology only supports the RPC's system integration style.  

The main advantages of RPC's is speed, but it can also be viewed as convenient and it stays within the object orientated design style.  
The disadvantages are; not interoperable, difficult to version, not scaleable, and lots of hidden complexity.  

For alternative RPC technologies you could potentially use; HttpInvoker, Hessian / Burlap, and even look at the SOAP technologies like JAX-RPC.    
Spring's RMI support can help reduce the complexity, but unless you really need to there are better ways to have systems communicate with each other.

I've previously worked with Java's RMI (EJB) technology so I'll avoid all of this complexity and just use a REST approach.  

You could start here; Spring Framework’s Inversion of Control (IoC) container.  

You could have many instances of the application context (IoC), but I'm not sure why would would do so.  If you wanted different configurations dependant upon runtime environments (for example for development, testing, live production) then springs profiles are designed to offer that functionality.    

Note that the term "container" has became one of the overused terms in computing.  It now has different meanings depending on the subject matter.  
The Spring IoC does not have much in common with other technologies that use the same term (like docker or JEE).  

Kind of similar;

Computers are incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid.
Human beings are incredibly slow, inaccurate, and brilliant.
Together they are powerful beyond imagination.  [Albert Einstein]

In spring aop it is run time weaving for the beans as you are using dynamic proxies that are returned by the container.  
There are two major limitations of spring aop; it only applies to public methods and only on spring beans (actually its the bean proxies that you use to access the spring beans).
   
I've not used AspectJ much, but have read that it's a more complete solution offering more features and compile time / class load time weaving.
Hopefully you will not be surprised to hear that spring offers aspectj integration.  

Here's a decent article comparing the two; Spring aop vs Aspectj

Maybe this will help what-about-the-java-ee-application-server

It still seems a little bit odd (as said above) using a framework like spring boot which was not designed (as far as I know) to run inside of a JEE server.  

Too big to byte; then take a nibble (nybble).

One of the ranchers seems to like this Learning Spring Boot By Greg Turnquist

Kind of thought Spring Boot was still at version 2?  
Spring Boot Documentation is always good.

If you think politics and communication are not important, you have at least another level to master before calling yourself a programmer.

you think your code is perfect,

It still wasn't perfect,
As year followed year,
And strangers would comment,
“Is that guy still here?”

He died at the console,
Of hunger and thirst.
Next day he was buried,
Face down, nine-edge first.
The Last Bug!

I think these interfaces allow a developer to extend the functionality of the framework in particular to customise the bean lifecycle behaviour.
Here's a quick video; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qGonNfth88