Question

I want to create a new system that will be built completely using services. I want to expose these services thru REST for client applications. But for performance reasons, I also want to make sure that other services can call a given service using local calls without paying the penalty of a remote call. Is there a framework that can help me do that.

Answer 1

Well, the way we have implemented this is by using something like Spring MVC where the controller just calls out to a Service class – our notion of Model. The Controller thus acts as "exposing the services" as RESTful services. The rest of the codebase accesses these Services just like any other object. Since we use spring, we leverage the IOC massively.

For example, we would have something like:

public class BillingService {

  public void doSomething(String someParam) {}

}

public class BillingController {

  @Autowired private BillingService billingService;

  public void doSomething(@RequestParam String someParam) {

     billingService.doSomething(someParam);

  }

}

In the above examples, the annotations are all from Spring, but you get the picture. Any other class which wants to access the BillingService method, they can do so just by accessing that class’s method.

I am not sure of any framework which is targeted at exactly this problem, but my guess is, you do not need one.