Notes

Used ToDo MVC features to add minor enhancements to Item (done attribute) and CRUD (filter by done). Having familiarity with DropWizard, thought this was a good chance to dabble in Spring Boot:

• Chose Jersey instead of SpringWebMvc because I prefer:

  @GET
  @Path("/id")
  

  over

  @RequestMapping(value="/id", method = RequestMethod.GET)
  

• Used JPA to avoid SQL grunt-work. Spring Data makes this trivial with Repository providing auto-generated CRUD and queries. The REST endpoints are such a thin CRUD-wrapper that @Transactional is overkill (but was trivial to add).
• Contemplated separate Item classes in jpa.model and api.model packages to decouple the database and API representations (auto-converted with modelmapper) but this was premature.
• Decided against Spring Data REST because HAL is really dense and verbose... also because this whole exercise would've been one file.

TODO

Thought about adding a User entity with a one-to-many relationship to Item then change the API to use HTTP Basic-Auth so that users have private To Do lists.

Running

This all assumes you're on *nix or Mac and have Java installed. The ./gradlw.bat wrapper should work for WIndows, but I don't know about any of the docker stuff.

Local Development

This uses a default application.properties that runs the service with an H2 in-memory database. Useful for local development since the database resets with service restart.

To build and run in one-step:

./gradlew bootRun

Docker

For a more production-like configuration, build the com.gmail.lnqhien/todo image:

./gradlew buildDocker

The application-gradle.properties baked into the image will make it connect to MySQL instead of H2.

Then bring up the isolated MySQL instance:

docker-compose up -d db

Once the db instance is ready (e.g.: docker logs todo_db_1), bring up the todo service:

docker-compose up -d todo

Avoid the one-shot docker-compose up since Compose's depends_on doesn't guarantee the db is ready before the todo tries to connect.

Testing

Both methods above make the service available at http://localhost:8080/todo. There is a CORS filter in place to allow browser clients to call the API.

Unit-testing with Spring-Jersey isn't as polished as SpringWebMvc and I ran out of time... so there is a rudimentary test.sh script to exercise all the available APIs:

Endpoint	Description
POST /todo	Add a new To-Do item
GET /todo/{id}	Get a single To-Do item
DELETE /todo/{id}	Delete a single To-Do item
PUT /todo/{id}	Update a single To-Do item
GET /todo	Get all To-Do items. Supports page, size, done query parameters for pagination and filtering, e.g. GET /todo?page=1&size=5&done=false