Environment Setup

This chapter focuses on the development environment setup and configurations. If you are familiar with the tools and libraries, you could skip this chapter and continue with Chapter 3, Domain-Driven Design, where you can explore domain-driven design (DDD).

This chapter will cover the following topics:

• Spring Boot
• REST
• An embedded web server
• Testing using Postman
• Maven

This book will use only the open source tools and frameworks for examples and code. This book will also use Java 11 as its programming language, while the application framework will be based on the Spring Framework. It will also make use of Spring Boot for developing microservices.

Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA, and NetBeans' Integrated Development Environment (IDE) provide state-of-the-art support for both Java and JavaScript, and is sufficient for our needs. These have evolved a lot over the years and have built-in support for most of the technologies used by this book, including Maven, and Spring Boot. Therefore, I would recommend using any of these IDEs. You are, however, better off using IDEs that support Java 11.

We will use Spring Boot to develop the REST services and microservices. Opting for the most popular offering of Spring Framework, Spring Boot, or its subset, Spring Cloud, in this book was a conscious decision. Because of this, we don't need to write applications from scratch and it provides the default configuration for most of the technologies used in cloud applications. A Spring Boot overview is provided in Spring Boot's configuration section. If you are new to Spring Boot, this would definitely help you.

We will use Maven as our build tool. As with the IDE, you can use whichever build tool you want; for example, Gradle, or Ant with Ivy. We will use an embedded Jetty server as our web server, but another alternative is to use an embedded Tomcat web server. We will also use the Postman extension of Chrome for testing our REST services.

We will start with Spring Boot configurations. You can either create fresh new projects or import the project (Maven) using source code hosted on GitHub.