Apache Camel + Spring Boot: Different components to expose HTTP endpoints

Apache Camel is an open source integration framework that allows you to integrate technologically diverse systems using a large library of components. A common use-case is to service HTTP based endpoints. Those of course come in several flavors and there is quite a choice in components to use.

In this blog post I'll take a look at what is available and how they differ with respect to flexibility to define multiple hosts, ports and URLs to host from using a single CamelContext. Depending on your use-case you will probably be using one of these. You can find my sample project here.

Calling an Oracle DB stored procedure from Spring Boot using Apache Camel

There are different ways to create data services. The choice for a specific technology to use, depends on several factors inside the organisation which wishes to realize these services. In this blog post I'll provide a minimal sample on how you can use Spring Boot with Apache Camel to call an Oracle database procedure which returns the result of an SQL query as an XML. You can browse the code here.

Apache Camel and Spring Boot: Calling multiple services in parallel and merging results

Sometimes you have multiple services you want to call at the same time and merge their results when they're all in (or after a timeout). In Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIP) this is a Splitter followed by an Aggregator. I wanted to try and implement this in Spring Boot using Apache Camel so I did. Since this is my first quick try at Apache Camel, I might not have followed much best practices. I used sample code from Baeldungs blog, combined it with this sample of sending parallel requests using Futures. You can browse my code here.

A transparent Spring Boot REST service to expose Oracle Database logic

Sometimes you have an Oracle database which contains a lot of logic and you want to expose specific logic as REST services. There are a variety of ways to do this. The most obvious one to consider might be Oracle REST Data Services. It is quite powerful and supports multiple authentication mechanisms like OAuth. Another option might be using the database embedded PL/SQL gateway This gateway however is deprecated for APEX and difficult to tune (believe me, I know).

Sometimes there are specific requirements which make the above solutions not viable. For example if you have complex custom authentication logic implemented elsewhere which might be difficult to translate to ORDS or the embedded PL/SQL gateway. ORDS also runs in stand-alone in a Docker container but this is not so easy for the PL/SQL gateway. Also if you are looking for a product or framework which can be used for multiple flavors of database, these solutions might be too Oracle specific.

You can consider creating your own custom service in for example Java. The problem here however is that it is often tightly coupled with the implementation. If for example parameters of a database procedure are mapped to Java objects or a translation from a view to JSON takes place in the service, there is often a tight coupling between the database code and the service.

In this blog post I'll provide a solution for a transparent Spring Boot REST service which forwards everything it receives to the database for further processing without this tight coupling, only to to a generic database procedure to handle all REST requests. The general flow of the solution is as follows:

• The service receives an HTTP request from a client
• Service translates the HTTP request to an Oracle database REST_REQUEST_TYPE object type
• Service calls the Oracle database over JDBC with this Object
• The database processes the REST_REQUEST_TYPE and creates a REST_RESPONSE_TYPE Object
• The database returns the REST_RESPONSE_TYPE Object to the service
• The service translates the REST_RESPONSE_TYPE Object to an HTTP response
• The HTTP response is returned to the client

Running Reactive Spring Boot on GraalVM in Docker

GraalVM is an open source polyglot VM which makes it easy to mix and match different languages such as Java, Javascript and R. It has the ability (with some restrictions) to compile code to native executables. This of course offers great performance benefits. Recently, GraalVM Docker files and images have become available. See here.

Since Spring Boot is a popular Java framework and reactive (non blocking) RESTful services/clients implemented in Spring Boot are also interesting to look at, I thought; lets combine those and produce a Docker image running a reactive Spring Boot application on GraalVM.

I've used and combined the following

• Building a Reactive RESTful Web Service
• Spring Boot with Docker and Running Spring Boot in a Docker container on OpenJDK, Oracle JDK, Zulu on Alpine Linux, Oracle Linux, Ubuntu
• Oracle's GraalVM Docker images
• (my very own) Ubuntu Development VM (requires VirtualBox, Vagrant)

As a base I've used the code provided in the following Git repository here. In the 'complete' folder (the end result of the tutorial) is a sample Reactive RESTful Web Service and client.

Running Spring Boot in a Docker container on OpenJDK, Oracle JDK, Zulu on Alpine Linux, Oracle Linux, Ubuntu

Spring Boot is great for running inside a Docker container. Spring Boot applications 'just run'. A Spring Boot application has an embedded servlet engine making it independent of application servers. There is a Spring Boot Maven plugin available to easily create a JAR file which contains all required dependencies. This JAR file can be run with a single command-line like 'java -jar SpringBootApp.jar'. For running it in a Docker container, you only require a base OS and a JDK. In this blog post I'll give examples on how to get started with different OSs and different JDKs in Docker. I'll finish with an example on how to build a Docker image with a Spring Boot application in it.

Application Container Cloud Service (ACCS): Using the Application Cache from a Spring Boot application

Spring Boot allows you to quickly develop microservices. Application Container Cloud Service (ACCS) allows you to easily host Spring Boot applications. Oracle provides an Application Cache based on Coherence which you can use from applications deployed to ACCS. In order to use the Application Cache from Spring Boot, Oracle provides an open source Java SDK. In this blog post I'll give an example on how you can use the Application Cache from Spring Boot using this SDK. You can find the sample code here.

Getting started with Spring Boot microservices. Why and how.

In order to quickly develop microservices, Spring Boot is a common choice. Why should I be interested in Spring Boot? In this blog post I'll give you some reasons why looking at Spring Boot is interesting and give some samples on how to get started quickly. I'll shortly talk about microservices, move on to Spring Boot and end with Application Container Cloud Service which is an ideal platform to run and manage your Spring Boot applications on. This blog touches many subjects but they fit together nicely. You can view the code of my sample Spring Boot project here. Most of the Spring Boot knowledge has been gained by the following free course by Java Brains.