Tag Archives: spring

Is a Microservices PaaS In Our Future?

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Last month at the Sydney Microservices Meetup, the Meetup’s organiser, Yamen Sader, presented a great talk on “A Microservices Reference Architecture“.

My own talk on the night, which was a case study about the evolution of microservices at Tyro Payments, laid out many examples of practices and tools we’ve used, but left it for people to either follow or ignore what we’ve done as they feel led. Yamen’s talk, on the other hand, was deliberately prescriptive, describing by the end what he obviously considers to be a widely-applicable framework – a “microservice platform in a box”, if you will. (He also ranked the importance of his suggestions based on a hilarious scale of Seinfeld characters, so he could recommended some ideas more strongly than others.)

Is a Microservices PaaS In Our Future?

A trendy, blue-lit data centre, the kind of place where it would be cool to run a Microservices PaaSYamen’s talk, as well as being really interesting, left me wondering about the future of microservices development. In particular, it had me wondering whether, at some point in the near future, we’ll see a Microservices Platform as a Service, or MSA-PaaS. I’m now thinking… Continue reading →

Do you even know the first thing about REST?

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A sign saying 'REST AREA', with an arrow pointing up and to the right.It’s not unusual to see examples where people think they are “doing REST”, but are not. A lot of people are trying to use simple web technologies in their microservice architectures, but I suspect there’s a prevalent idea that if you are using HTTP and sending JSON back and forth, you’re doing REST, which is simply not the case. (We’re talking about the Representational State Transfer style of software architecture here, in case you’re lost.)

Spring’s REST

Spring’s Web MVC Framework documentation says in the first paragraph: “With the introduction of Spring 3.0, the @Controller mechanism also allows you to create RESTful Web sites and applications…” Further on, introducing its @RestController interface, it says: “It’s a very common use case to have Controllers implement a REST API, thus serving only JSON, XML or custom MediaType content.” So, does creating a web service using a @RestController-annotated class magically make it a RESTful service?
No. Such no.

Not so REST

The big thing I see developers getting wrong when trying to use web technologies for inter-service communication is that they continue to think about operations. Continue reading →

A New Java Library for Amazing Productivity

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I’ve found this great Java library that can make developers more efficient in pretty much every source file they write. It has the following features:

  • Ferrari 458 Italiaa broad and powerful collections framework
  • collection methods that greatly reduce boilerplate
  • immutable collections that don’t have mutation methods (unlike java.util classes where e.g. List.add() throws an exception if the list is immutable)
  • an awesome switch-like function that doesn’t just match numbers, enums, chars and strings, but can succinctly match all kinds of patterns in lots of different classes, even in your own classes
  • an annotation that automatically writes meaningful equals, hashCode and toString methods for classes whose fields don’t change (without using reflection) Continue reading →