Spring Boot Template

Author:	Marco Massenzio (marco@alertavert.com)
Revision:	1.0-SNAPSHOT
Created:	2014-12-21
Updated:	2014-12-23

Overview

This is a skeleton project to get going quickly with the Spring Boot framework, using Spring Data for the backend and Spring Rest for the frontend.

Just clone and modify.

Data Structure

The Persistence Layer is based on MongoDB, using DAOs to separate data concerns from business logic concerns.

Data access is via Spring Repositories

Application Framework

This project uses Spring as the main application framework, Spring Boot to manage the application, and Spring Data to manage the repositories.

Dependencies are managed via Maven (see the POM)

All endpoints are exposed via Spring REST and take the form:

[METHOD] /issues/{id}

where METHOD is one of the usual {GET, POST, PUT, DELETE} set and the {id} uniquely identifies the entity in the DB.

HATEOAS

Spring REST implements the HATEOAS principles, and enables discovery of endpoints and resources; the starting point is the root API [1]:

http://localhost:8080/api/v1

which returns something similar to:

{
    "_links": {
       "issues": {
            "href": "http://localhost:8080/api/v1/issue{?page,size,sort}",
            "templated": true
        },
        "profile": {
            "href": "http://localhost:8080/api/v1/alps"
        }
    }
}

and from which a client application can progress to "discover" services and entities [#]_.

Search Queries

Spring REST also supports out-of-the-box search querying capabilities, linked to the methods exposed by the Spring Repositories, via URI parameters mapping.

To discover the search capabilities of a given entity (again, following HATEOAS principles) one uses the search resource:

http://localhost:8080/api/v1/issue/search

and queries against the entity can be executed by hitting an endpoint such as:

http://localhost:8080/api/v1/issue/search/findByReporter?reporter=user-1

which is mapped from the repository method:

@RepositoryRestResource(path = "issue")
public interface IssueRepository extends PagingAndSortingRepository<Issue, String> {
    Issue findByReporter(@Param("reporter")String reporter);
}

As this is a PagingAndSortingRepository, the usual page etc. query params are allowed too.

Testing, Deploying & Running the Application

Testing and running locally is achieved via Maven:

mvn clean test
mvn clean cobertura:cobertura test
mvn clean cobertura:check test

the second and third invocation will, respectively, generate the code coverage report (in target/site/cobertura/index.html) and check that test coverage exceeds the minimum threshold set in pom.xml:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
    <artifactId>cobertura-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.6</version>
    <configuration>
        ...
        <check>
            <totalLineRate>70</totalLineRate>
        </check>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

see the cobertura plugin documentation for more info.

Spring Boot generates the application as an embedded Tomcat JAR application, so this can be run either via mvn or directly via java:

mvn spring-boot:run
java -jar target/spring-template-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar -Dsecurity.user.password=azekre7

see .travis.yml for an example of how to deploy and execute on a "blank" Linux (Debian) server.

Using AWS Beanstalk

TODO: experiment & document here

Copyright and License

This software is (c) 2014 Marco Massenzio and is licensed according to the Apache 2 License ; see also the LICENSE file in this folder.

[1]	The root endpoint has been customized via the RestConfiguration class from the default

/ .. [#] See the section about Resource Discoverability for more information.