This REST service is documented and mocked with Apiary.io. You can find the API documentation here: https://docs.alchemy.apiary.io/. The current mock URL is https://alchemy.apiary-mock.com/v1. You can make the front-end consume this mock by editing expenses.js, as following:
var expensesApp = angular.module("expensesApp", ["restangular", "ui.date"]).config(function (RestangularProvider) {
RestangularProvider.setBaseUrl('https://alchemy.apiary-mock.com/v1');
});Before you run the backend application, you need to have a local MySQL database available. To create it with the right parameters, you can use the provided createdb.sql script.
> mysql -u root < createdb.sql The DDL will be run by Hibernate, so you don't need to create any tables.
The backend consists of one WAR file. To build it you will need Java 8 and Maven 3 installed. Earlier versions of Java should work as well, but haven't been tested.
To build the WAR file, run from inside the backend folder.
> mvn clean package The resulting WAR file will be target/backend-coding-test-0.0-SNAPSHOT.war. You can deploy this into your favorite server. I tested Tomcat 7.
Once your WAR is deployed and running, go to https://localhost:8080/backend-coding-test-0.0-SNAPSHOT/expenses to test it. You should see JSON output.
This implementation writes CORS headers, allowing you to consume it from different hosts when you are using a modern browser. That means that you can use your local static copy of the frontend to consume this service straight away. You only need to change Restangular's base URL in expenses.js as follows:
var expensesApp = angular.module("expensesApp", ["restangular", "ui.date"]).config(function (RestangularProvider) {
RestangularProvider.setBaseUrl('https://localhost:8080/backend-coding-test-0.0-SNAPSHOT');
});Of course this is only for happy development. We wouldn't do this in more restricted environments.
If you don't have Java 8 or Maven in your machine, you can use Docker to set up a small virtual machine that runs the compiled code. You will see there is a file called Dockerfile. This is used to build the server image. In this case, the frontend is also included into the server, so you can do a complete test.
The script does the following, starting with a plain Ubuntu as a base image:
- Update the OS packages.
- Install Java 8.
- Copy the Java code to the container and compile it.
- Install Tomcat 7.
- Install MySQL and initialize the required database.
- Deploy the WAR file.
- Install Nginx and copy the frontend files to the web root folder.
- Configure Nginx to proxy the /expenses path to Tomcat.
- Expose the container's port 80.
To build it, after you have installed Docker, run from the folder that contains Dockerfile:
docker build -t frangz/alchemy .The build process will take a few minutes. This is because we are using Ubuntu bare as the base image. To speed things up we could be using a base image that has Java and Tomcat installed. Also, instead of compiling the code, the final WAR file could be downloaded from an artifacty repository.
Once the build process is done, you will have a new image called frangz/alchemy. To run it, run the following:
docker run -d -p 8080:80 frangz/alchemyThis will start a new server as a daemon (-d) and it will bind your local port 8080 to the server's port 80. After a minute or so, you should see the website in htto:https://localhost:8080.
To stop the docker container, run docker ps to find out the container ID, and then run:
docker stop <id>Much of the steps that we described in the Dockerfile, like installing Tomcat and Nginx can be replaced by more complex configuration management tools like Puppet and Chef. This would allow a finer control on the server configuration, such us package versions or more complex configurations.