Photo credit For our next adventure in Java microservices, we want to expand our system for book review data. While books and authors are well-suited for a document database such as MongoDB, once you add reviews to the mix, the importance of the relationships makes this project better suited for a graph database. This way, we can utilize relationships between the different entities to improve analysis based on the structure of the connections.

Photo credit We continue building our microservices system by adding a coordination layer to handle spinning multiple services up and down. In previous blog posts, we grew from two Spring Boot applications to three applications + a database container. As we continue to scale and broaden our system, we will need something to coordinate service and ensure consistent communication (avoid human error). We will do this through docker-compose, an orchestration tool that manages containerized applications.

Photo credit This blog post is the fourth iteration in a series of posts about building microservices in Java. The initial post started with a single string message passed between two locally-running applications, and we are gradually adding services and functionality along the way. In this level 4 installment, we will add a new service that will manage book authors. It will call a database containing a data domain of books and retrieve authors and their information.