Setting Up the Development Environment

This chapter focuses on the development environment setup and configurations. If you are familiar with the tools and libraries, you could skip this chapter and continue with Chapter 3, Domain-Driven Design, where you could explore the domain-driven design (DDD).

This chapter will cover the following topics:

• NetBeans IDE installation and setup
• Spring Boot configuration
• Sample REST program with Java 9 modules
• Building setup
• REST API testing using the Postman extension of Chrome

This book will use only the open source tools and frameworks for examples and code. This book will also use Java 9 as its programming language, and the application framework will be based on the Spring Framework. This book makes use of Spring Boot to develop microservices.

NetBeans' Integrated Development Environment (IDE) provides state of the art support for both Java and JavaScript, and is sufficient for our needs. It has evolved a lot over the years and has built-in support for most of the technologies used by this book, such as Maven, Spring Boot, and so on. Therefore, I would recommend that you use NetBeans IDE. You are, however, free to use any IDE.

We will use Spring Boot to develop the REST services and microservices. Opting for the most popular of Spring Frameworks, Spring Boot, or its subset Spring Cloud, in this book was a conscious decision. Because of this, we don't need to write applications from scratch and it provides the default configuration for most of the technologies used in cloud applications. A Spring Boot overview is provided in Spring Boot's configuration section. If you are new to Spring Boot, this would definitely help you.

We will use Maven as our build tool. As with the IDE, you can use whichever build tool you want, for example, Gradle or Ant with Ivy. We will use the embedded Jetty as our web server, but another alternative is to use an embedded Tomcat web server. We will also use the Postman extension of Chrome for testing our REST services.

We will start with Spring Boot configurations. If you are new to NetBeans or are facing issues in setting up the environment, you can refer to the following section.