Creating a Microservice with Spring Boot

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of microservices. I have blogged about creating a microservice with Akka, and I’m an avid follower of all things service-oriented. This weekend I decided that I would try and see why people are so excited about Spring Boot, and, as a foot in the door to Spring Boot, I would build a microservice.

The first issue I encountered was a lot of conflicting advice on where to get started. For an opinionated framework, it felt awkward that so many people had so many recommendations just to get into the Hello World phase. You can download the Spring CLI, or you can use the Spring Boot starter service online to create a starter project. You can also choose to have your project built by Gradle or Maven.

Since I’m on a Mac, I made sure my homebrew installation was up to date and just fired off:

brew install gvm

I did this so I could have gvm manage my springboot installations. I used gvm to install spring boot as follows:

gvm install springboot

If you want you can have homebrew install springboot directly.

The next step is to create a new, empty Spring Boot project. You can do this by hitting up the Spring Initializr  (http://start.spring.io) or you can use the spring boot CLI to create your stub (this still uses the Spring Initializr service under the covers).

$ spring init --build=gradle HelloService
Using service at https://start.spring.io
Project extracted to '/Users/khoffman/Code/SpringBoot/HelloService'

This creates a new application in a directory called HelloService. There is a DemoApplication class in the demo package that is decorated with the @SpringBootApplication annotation. Without going into too much detail (mostly because I don’t know much detail), this annotation tells Spring to enable automatic configuration based on discovered dependencies and tells it to automatically scan for components to satisfy DI requirements.

Next, I need to make sure that the project has access to the right annotations and components to let me rig up a basic REST controller, so I’ll add the following dependency to my build.gradle file in the dependencies section:

compile("org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-web")

Now I can create a new file called ZombieController.java in src/main/java/demo/controller:

package demo.controller;

import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RestController;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;

@RestController
public class ZombieController {
  @RequestMapping("/zombies")
  public String getZombies() {
    return "Goodbye, cruel world";
  }
}

With no additional work or wiring up, I can now do a gradle build in the root of my application directory and then I can execute the application (the web server comes embedded, which is one of the reasons why it’s on my list of good candidates for microservice building):

java -jar build/libs/demo-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar

Now hitting http://localhost:8080/zombies will return the string “Goodbye, cruel world”. This is all well and good, but I don’t think it goes far enough for a sample. Nobody builds microservices that return raw strings, they build microservices that return actual data, usually in the form of JSON.

Fist, let’s build a Zombie model object using some Jackson JSON annotations:

@JsonAutoDetect(getterVisibility = JsonAutoDetect.Visibility.NONE)
@JsonIgnoreProperties(ignoreUnknown = true)
public class Zombie {

 @NotEmpty
 @JsonSerialize
 @JsonProperty("name")
 private String name;

 @NotEmpty
 @JsonSerialize
 @JsonProperty("age")
 private int age;

 public Zombie(String name, int age) {
   this.name = name;
   this.age = age;
 }
 public String getName() {
   return name;
 }
 public int getAge() {
   return age;
 }
}

And now I can add a new method to my controller that returns an individual Zombie, and takes care of JSON serialization for me based on my preferences defined on the class:

 @RequestMapping("/zombies/{id}")
 public @ResponseBody Zombie getZombie(@PathVariable("id") int id) {
   return new Zombie("Bob", id);
 }

Now I can rebuild my application with gradle build (or I can install a gradle wrapper via gradle wrapper and then invoke ./gradlew build) and then run it again. Once it has compiled and it’s running again, I can hit the following URL with curl: http://localhost:8080/zombies/12

And I will get the following JSON reply:

{"name":"Bob","age":12}

And that’s basically it, at least for the simplest hello world sample of a Spring Boot service. Ordinarily, you wouldn’t return values directly from inside the controller, instead the controllers usually delegate to “auto wired” services, which perform the real work. But, for the purposes of my sample, I decided it was okay to leave the code in the controller.

So, what’s my conclusion? Well, writing a single REST method that returns fake data is by no means a way to judge an entire framework. However, if you’ve been doing RESTful services in Java and have not been using Spring Boot, then this is likely a super refreshing change of pace. I’ll likely keep poking around with it so I can get a better idea for how it behaves in a real production environment.