noyloy/playermicroservice

a microservice which serves the contents of player.csv through REST API

Player Microservice

Startup - DB Seed Process (PlayerDB)

Notes

Assumptions and Limitations

• The Player CSV should be sanitised further and when loading it there should be better edge case handling
  • fallback to default values
  • keeping a dictionary (in memory or using an api or some sort of external service) of places to handle ambiguous locations
  • conversion of date should be better handled
• The initial load parallelize the row loading (8 threads at a time)
  • this could be fine-tuned to get the best startup loading time
  • this could be further parallelized between loaders (currently there is only one the PlayerLoader)
• The API should add a user input validation phase (especially for the get player by id)

Deployment

• The deployment process should take into consideration that the Player database is probably seeded/loaded already, and have some sort of seeding process that is not related to the startup of this MS
• Deployment should automatically trigger the unit tests, and the (not implemented yet) Integration and API tests
  • preferably with GitHub action, and connection to a Jenkins job

Structure

• The project structure is not optimal but enables a shift to a better structure
  • one that will separate the Interfaces from the actual implementations ( I kept them within the same directory)
  • optimally the implementations would be in a separate project and have a reference to the interface declarations
  • then the reference could be done by some-kind of Artifactory, keeping track of versions

Future-proofing

• Creating more csv loaders is possible, that way there could be multiple .csv files to load to different repositories
• The DB engine is H2, and in real life (or when we take this to production) this would need to be replaced with a persistent layer (not in mem) such as mysql or postgres
  • it would be simple to replace the engine, with the application properties of this SpringBoot project
• Monitoring of the usage of this API MS, and next phase would need to consider caching of "popular" players/teams, should the data indicate so.

Summary

Overall - I had fun
I admit I felt a bit rusty,
But that feeling was only fueling me to continue and improve the code
and recall how I love the Spring Framework and the Java Ecosystem.