Bartender

Bartender test implementation using Spring Boot, Akka, Tomcat and Rest endpoints.

Requirements:

• Java 8
• Maven 3.3.9

Instructions to use:

• Download the code from https://github.com/sasaen/bartender
• Run it by opening a terminal, cd to the downloaded folder and type: mvn spring-boot:run
• Use a rest client (i.e. curl or Restlet client) to execute the endpoints:
  • http://localhost:8080/bartender/request/{customerName}/{drinkType} It´s a POST endpoint to request a DRINK or BEER by a {customerName}. Possible values for a drink: DRINK or BEER (case sensitive).
  • http://localhost:8080/bartender/served-drinks It´s a GET end point to get all the served drinks.
  • To see the Rest documentation generated by Swagger, please visit: http://localhost:8080/swagger-ui.html
• All the tests can executed typing: mvn test
• The timeout properties can be customised here: bartender/src/main/resources/application.properties.
• The capacity (number of beer/drinks that the bartender can handle at the same time) can be also customised in application.properties.
• The log level can be customised here: logback-spring.xml I intentionally not included the thread names [%thread] for easy reading of the logs.

Assumption:

• Just to clarify the spec, while the bartender is preparing a BEER, he can also take another BEER request without affecting the preparation time of the first BEER.

Notes:

• I chose Akka because it is a modern toolkit based on the actor model that provides a level of abstraction that makes it easier to write correct concurrent, parallel and distributed systems.
• I expected a better integration between Akka and Spring, so that actors would be created by the spring container and injected in other classes but I did not find a way to do that. Injecting the dependencies would help implementing the unit tests by injecting mock Actors.
• Using Akka was a proof of concept to me and seems to work ok, but as I mentioned the integration with Spring could be better.
• Another option would be to implement it using Spring Reactor.
• As commented above, I used Swagger for the documentation of the endpoints.
• As an extra, added Spring Actuator endpoint which provides links to other end points like: health, metrics, beans, etc: http://localhost:8080/actuator http://localhost:8080/health
  http://localhost:8080/metrics
  http://localhost:8080/beans
• I added an Integration test that tests multiple requests and gets the list of served drinks. This is useful for invoking concurrently the endpoints.
• I did not implement a front end (html/javascript), instead I tested it manually with Reslet Client and programatically with the integration test.

TODO:

• Write unit tests for the Actor classes. I was expecting an intuitive way to mock the behaviour of these actors. This needs further investigation.
• Find out best practices for Akka actor creation, supervision, life cycle, error handling and integration with Spring.