Architecture

On the 15th February 2018 I had a pleasure to speak at The JVM Roundabout Meetup in London. My topic was “Practical Choreography with Spring Cloud”. The idea behind the talk was to give practical advice on introducing choreography into microservices architecture. The emphasis is on practical. Choreography can be intimidating, especially for those not familiar with the pattern. Since I am a big advocate of Spring Cloud and I think it is a great framework for newcomers and experts alike, I demonstrate how it can be used to make that adoption easier. ...

HATEOAS – Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State, a name long enough to intimidate and confuse. Behind this complicated name we have a rather simple and elegant idea. In this blog post, I explain what HATEOAS is and how it can be practically used to build more stable systems. HATEOAS is a way of designing a REST API. More precisely it is a specific constraint of a REST architecture. It can be summed up with: ...

GRASP stands for General responsibility assignment software patterns. You might have heard of it before, or you might not. Either way, you might not have thought about how these principles can potentially help when deciding your responsibilities assignments in a microservices architecture. Craig Larman in his book Applying UML and Patterns said that the “desert island skill”, the most important skill to have in Object Oriented Analysis/Design would be: *“to skillfully assign responsibilities to software objects”.*I think there is some truth to this when thinking about the most important microservices skill as well. Lets look at GRASP through the prism of microservices. ...

A lot of people want to start working with Microservices and don’t quite know where to start. I remember being there- finding that my next project is going to use microservices architecture and I should get familiar with it. Of course, I heard about microservices before and I have read some blog posts, but I felt that my knowledge had major gaps. If you are in this situation- worry no more! Just get yourself a copy of “Building Microservices” by Sam Newman and read it! Continue to find out more why I think this book has you covered. ...

If you are interested in building Microservices in the JVM ecosystem- you have to check out Spring Cloud. Spring Cloud is a project which goal is to make Microservices architecture and patterns simple and practical to use. Spring Boot provides opinionated way of making a Microservice, Spring Cloud gives you an opinionated framework for getting your architecture around them. The Scope of Spring Cloud Spring Cloud is a large project that is difficult to talk about as a whole. It is easier to look at individual components and see what they bring to the table. One great thing about Spring Cloud is that you are free to mix and match the components. You may for example want to use Spring Cloud Config server and nothing else. You can even use that with non-Java based microservices. Here are the parts of Spring Cloud with brief descriptions of what they do: ...