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One of the many reasons for huge popularity of Spring and SpringBoot is it’s great support for Testing. We can write unit tests using Mockito without requiring any Spring features. And, we can write Integration Tests using Spring testing support by creating Spring ApplicationContext. Read Guide to Testing SpringBoot Applications While running integration tests we might need to interact with external services like relational databases, NoSQL datastores, Kafka etc.

I have been working with Spring and SpringBoot for many years and I needed to create lot of Spring(Boot) applications for various reasons like blog posts, sample apps, book sample code and for my personal learning as well. So, I needed some tool/mechanism to quickly create Spring(Boot) application with most commonly used configuration. I know we have the most popular SpringBoot Initializer to create SpringBoot applications. But, it generates the application with only selected starter dependencies added and nothing more.

Postman is the most popular tool for testing REST APIs. I guess most of the developers are familiar with how to use Postman to send various types (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc) of HTTP requests with various types of payloads (form data, JSON etc). In addition to triggering one API request and verifying the response, I frequently come across some common needs like Call an API and assert response Parameterize variables based on the environment Trigger a series of API calls to simulate some user flow Trigger one API request with different inputs and assert expected response Load test by simulating load on the server by firing a series of requests repeatedly with a certain delay Run Postman collection to do Smoke Test from Build Pipeline As I am already using Postman to test my REST APIs, I thought of exploring if I can do all these tasks using Postman itself and it turns out I can.

SpringBoot is the most popular tech stack for building Java based REST APIs. In this tutorial we will learn how to write tests for SpringBoot applications. Create SpringBoot Application Unit Testing using JUnit 5 and Mockito Integration Testing using TestContainers Testing MicroService Integrations using MockServer As we all know, we write unit tests for testing single component (a class) behaviour where as we write integration tests for testing a feature which may involve interaction with multiple components.

In the previous post Kafka Tutorial - Java Producer and Consumer we have learned how to implement a Producer and Consumer for a Kafka topic using plain Java Client API. In this post we are going to look at how to use Spring for Kafka which provides high level abstraction over Kafka Java Client API to make it easier to work with Kafka. You can find the source code for this article at https://github.

Kafka, depending on how you use it, can be seen as a Message Broker, Event Store or a Streaming Platform etc. Kafka became a preferred technology for many of the modern applications because of various reasons like: Kafka can be used as an Event Store if you are using Event Driven Microservices architecture Kafka can be used as a Message Broker to enable communication across multiple applications Kafka can be used as Streaming platform for processing events in realtime etc etc.

I have been working with SpringBoot for many years and over the time I worked with many SpringBoot based codebases. There are few common mistakes that I observe in the projects that use SpringBoot. So, I thought of writing down few good practices that can be followed while using SpringBoot. 1. Understand SpringBoot Core Concepts I know, this sounds very obvious but I see many developers jumping onto using SpringBoot without having any prior knowledge on Spring, Dependency Injection.

One of the challenges in microservices architecture is the ability to debug issues. A simple user action might trigger a chain of downstream microservice calls. It would be tedious to trace the logs related to a particular user action across microservices. In addition to that, we might want to track down why a certain microservice call is taking so much time. We can use Spring Cloud Sleuth to handle these kinds of issues.

In microservices architecture, there could be a number of API services and few UI components that are talking to APIs. As of now, many microservices based application still use monolithic front-ends where the entire UI is built as a single module. You may choose to go with micro-frontends where the UI is also decomposed into multiple microservice talking to APIs to get the relevant data. Instead of letting UI know about all our microservices details we can provide a unified proxy interface that will delegate the calls to various microservices based on URL pattern.

In the microservices world, to fulfill a client request one microservice may need to talk to other microservices. We should minimize this kind of direct dependencies on other microservices but in some cases it is unavoidable. If a microservice is down or not functioning properly then the issue may cascade up to the upstream services. Netflix created Hystrix library implementing Circuit Breaker pattern to address these kinds of issues. We can use Spring Cloud Netflix Hystrix Circuit Breaker to protect microservices from cascading failures.