The formal definition can be found here
In simplest terms, imagine breaking down a large application into a bunch of smaller applications, each of which have a specific task.
- For example, I may build a microservice just to deal with authentication tokens and verifying them
Microservices generally communicate based on HTTP requests.
There can be a lot of benefits to using microservices, but I'll save that for a later discussion. For now, let's get into how to quickly build one!
Built using Maven and Java 8.
Built using Java Spark framework found here
To launch the application, run the Application.java class.
- A server is now started on localhost:4567.
- As defined in our WebServer.java class, we have a /request route that we can send information to.
For this example, we will be using Postman to send HTTP requests to our microservice.
Let's start by entering that URL we have above. In this case, it would be localhost:4567/request
Great. Now that we are sending a request to the /request route on our microservice, let's add in some query parameters.
- As defined in our RequestRoute.java, we will be using the 'inputField' parameter in this example
Awesome. Now we are ready to send the data! Hit send and checkout the response!
- The response we received is the inputField backwards. In RequestRoute.java, we pass the information into MyController and then return to the user their input backwards.
Yeah, reversing a string might not be your end goal. Luckily, microservices can be nearly anything you want. For example, try making an authentication server which takes in requests and returns a 'token' assigned to that user.