jiayu / web-skeleton

Web project skelecton

Web-Skeleton

A skeleton project for WebSerivce based on Spring Boot

##Goals

• Standalone server
• Restful API with swagger to show API spec
• Interceptor based authorization and performance calculation
• Integration with database migration tool
• JPA ready
• Exception handling
• Monitoring features

Standalone server

In this project, we use Spring Boot to power the application server. There are a couple advantages in this approach, some of them are below:

• a mature framework with all Spring features
• easy to develop/debug/deploy
• quick start

Restful API

A example of restful API is given in UserController. I don't feel like there is much to say about how easy Spring helps to get all the parameters in URI.

However, I would love to mention that, with the help of Swagger, your documentation writing time is saved.

Interceptors

Yes, for every WebService server, authorization is a must. I have done a lot of this in my day to day projects. I think it is a good idea to hide it somewhere instead of doing in every logical endpoint.

Interceptor in Spring in a savior. Thanks to AOP, interceptor performs its logic before and after each http request without touching any of the code in controller classes. Take a look at ValidationInterceptor and ExecutionInterceptor and feel how they work.You can also add your customized interceptor and register it in MvcConfiguration class.

Database migration tool

A good practise of managing database schema is to manage it in your code. This help in several ways including:

• deployment to different environments
• writing integration tests

Spring Boot supports Liquidbase and Flyway by default. The reason I choose liquidbase is because the flexibility of managing database schema. I use YAML for schema file as it is database agnostic, allowing me the use the same schema file in production and integration test. Even better, if for same reasons, I want to switch MySQL to ProgresSQL or vice versa, I don't need to update any of these schema files.

Spring JPA

Just a easy way to handle database operation. Pretty common requirements in web server, I believe.

Exception handling

Exception handling is another common requirement in not just web server but all kinds of applications. Spring Boot(MVC) takes care of most of the heavy lifting already. Meaning that, it deals with most of the exception it generally you can meet with its framework. But I want to add some specific to my application, eg: validation exception. I added a GlobalExceptionHandler. It saves those exceptions that I didn't think of which I can later revisit. Furthermore, it catches validation exception and returns a proper http status code in response.

Monitoring

Already enabled Spring Actuator. Need to read more in the doc to find out how it works.