Rest based API server

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Rest based API servers are very common these days. This has also led to the logical separation of front-end and back-end. New front-end techniques like Single page applications nicely fit with these concepts and also is a logical separation of ownership. Backend deals with providing the information in the form of API and front-end deals with presenting them in an appropriate way. This is also true for mobile applications that connect to the backend via Rest-based API's.


The other need is where organizations want to make themselves accessible via API platforms. This again requires Rest-based API servers.

Putting a Rest-based API server means a lot of frameworks need to play with each other. There are functional concerns about security, performance needs to be taken care of. However, at the core, it's about exposing endpoints as web services that can consume and emit JSON data.

The other aspect that needs to be handled is the choice of language and the frameworks. It can be done in hundreds of languages and each language has multiple ways to do it.

In the same context, I have put a Java-based API server skeleton in place. The source code is available at

https://github.com/lalitmcb/rms

Do check out the master branch. The other branches may not be stable. For forking and maintaining a relationship this repository, check Forking and maintaining a git repository

The API server code is in the server folder. Also, do read the server/README.md which contains all the details of how to bring it locally and run it. The frameworks that I have used are the following. (I will deal with individual choices with time and why I chose to do things a certain way)

• Gradle as a build tool
• Spring Boot
• Spring Security using JWT
• Hibernate
• Liquibase
• Hibernate Envers
• Postgres as DB
• Lombok
• Unit tests
• Integration tests
• Swagger 2

Other Functional Aspects:

• Paging and sorting
• Application versioning

This will remain a work in progress. Feel free to comment if you want to see certain things handled. And feel free to use it. All the details in server/README.md

A video explaining the steps to do the setup