martalourido / dev-news-spring

Backend API for a developer news site done with Spring

Introduction

In this project I have built the backend API for a news site for developers where users can create articles with topics and comments. It doesn't require a GUI, so it's enough to be able to make requests and get plain json text responses via curl/Postman.

Learning Objectives

• Understand the basic structure of a Spring application.
• Practice building, testing and consuming rest APIs.
• Learn about data modelling for real world applications.
• Learn how to interact with a relational database using an ORM tool implementing Spring JPA (Hibernate).

Technologies used

• Spring Web
• Spring JPA
• PostgreSQL Driver
• Postman
• Docker

Setup

You will need to configure the following dependencies in your build.gradle:

• Spring Web
• Spring JPA
• PostgreSQL Driver

Dependencies configuration

src/main/resources/application.properties should also be properly configured:

spring.jpa.database=POSTGRESQL
spring.jpa.show-sql=true

spring.datasource.url=jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5431/demo
spring.datasource.username=demo_user
spring.datasource.password=demo_pass

spring.jpa.generate-ddl=true
spring.jpa.hibernate.ddl-auto=create

Run the project

• Clone and open in Intellij Idea IDE
• Change database connection config in src/main/resources/application.properties
• Install gradle dependencies
• Run the app using ./gradlew bootRun
• Browse http//localhost:8080

API Doc & Sample

Articles

Article is the core entity in our project. It represents a news article with a unique id, title, body (article text content) and the authorName.

Example JSON response when requesting an article:

{
    "id": 1,
    "title": "10 reasons to learn Spring",
    "body": "In this article I'll be listing 10 reasons why you should learn spring and use it in your next project...",
    "authorName": "John Smith"
}

These are the endpoints for the article API:

HTTP Method	HTTP Path	Action
GET	/articles	return all articles.
GET	/articles/{id}	return a specific article based on the provided id.
POST	/articles	create a new article.
PUT	/articles/{id}	update the given article.
DELETE	/articles/{id}	delete the given article.

Comments

We want our visitors to be able to comment the different articles with a unique id, body, authorName (for the comment), and article on which the comment was posted. Each article can have zero or more comments.

Example JSON response when requesting a comment:

{
    "id": 1,
    "body": "This article is very well written",
    "authorName": "John Smith",
    "article": {
        "id": 1,
        "title": "10 reasons to learn Spring",
        "body": "In this article I'll be listing 10 reasons why you should learn spring and use it in your next project...",
        "authorName": "John Smith"
    }
}

With the following endpoints:

HTTP Method	HTTP Path	Action
GET	/articles/{articleId}/comments	return all comments on article given by articleId.
GET	/comments?authorName={authorName}	return all comments made by author given by authorName.
POST	/articles/{articleId}/comments	create a new comment on article given by articleId.
PUT	/comments/{id}	update the given comment.
DELETE	/comments/{id}	delete the given comment.

Topics

We want to categorize our articles by topics. Each topic can be applied to zero or many articles and each article can have zero or many topics.

Example JSON response when requesting an article:

{
    "id": 1,
    "title": "10 reasons to learn Spring",
    "body": "In this article I'll be listing 10 reasons why you should learn spring and use it in your next project...",
    "authorName": "John Smith",
    "topics": [
        {
            "id": 1,
            "name": "backend"
        },
        {
            "id": 2,
            "name": "java"
        },
        {
            "id": 3,
            "name": "spring"
        }
    ]
}

Endpoints:

HTTP Method	HTTP Path	Action
GET	/topics	return all topics.
GET	/articles/{articleId}/topics	return all topics associated with article given by articleId.
POST	/articles/{articleId}/topics	associate the topic with the article given by articleId. If topic does not already exist, it is created.
POST	/topics	create a new topic.
PUT	/topics/{id}	update the given topic.
DELETE	/topics/{id}	delete the given topic.
DELETE	/articles/{articleId}/topics/{topicId}	delete the association of a topic for the given article. The topic & article themselves remain.
GET	/topics/{topicId}/articles	return all articles associated with the topic given by topicId.

Note

You can test the performance of these endpoints in Postman

About

I am a junior programmer and this project was done during the backend module for the KTH Software Development Academy.

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Copyright (c) [2021] [Marta Lourido]