Integration of a web application with a third party application - java

I am developing an integration solution where my web application has to communicate with a third party application. Web application can call the services of the third party application only by calling its executable with specific parameters. Third party application then produces results in form of files that are stored on the server where it is installed. These files are to be used and processed by the web application. The web application and the third party application will not necessarily be on the same servers. The web application is built with Spring framework.
At the moment I am trying to search for the best methodologies and best practices that should be used to perform this integration. Since I am new to this area I do not know the exact terminologies that I should use to search for. I also do not know the exact term that describes such a setting where a web application is integrated with such a third party application.
I need some guidance about what kind of information to search for and what terminologies to use during the search. This is important for me because I also need to document to whole search process and the solution based on current methodologies and best practices.
Thanks a lot in advance!
Asma

You should be able to use Spring Web-Service client APIs, see below links help you to find an approach.
http://static.springsource.org/spring-ws/site/reference/html/client.html
Spring Web Service Client Tutorial or Example Required

Related

Set up web services based environment (advice/tips to start)

I am a bit lost because it's my first time assuming this role for a project.
We are making a software which consists in an app developed in Phonegap (for making a service oriented architecture, to make multiplatform easier).
The Phonegap app (and also the admin web) will be consuming constantly web services (every functionality is a service), and is my task to set up and environment to publish the API with the different services. I have heard about JAX-RS and also Spring MVC (I prefer this last option, because the good integration with Tomcat, and knowledge on the framework).
I have more or less clear the architecture (Tomcat+Spring+WebServices), but I am not sure how to start, because of the integration with the mobile app. I obviously want to develop with Java in the server side.
Any advice to start or related?
Thanks too much to all.
I would suggest you go for Apache CXF support for Rest Service.You can deploy the same in a tomcat server.I will suggest you to read the following URLs for better understanding:
http://www.dreamsyssoft.com/blog/blog.php?/archives/7-Simple-JAX-RS-Web-Service-in-Java-with-Spring-and-CXF.html
http://cxf.apache.org/docs/restful-services.html
Hope this helps.

Self contained jar with Camel and Web Interface?

I have had lots of trobule trying to get my head around how to solve this scenario:
We have an integration application that uses Camel for integration. This application also has a REST Api that exposes some services providing information about the application, for instance listing the active routes etc.
I have created a user interface for this using AngularJS that connects to these rest services. My main problem is how can I package this application as a self contained jar-file that provides the user interface and all the camel integration.
My working theory: Use a separate Jetty server to serve the Angular JS files and let Camel expose the REST services. The problem with this is CORS since the REST services reside on another port than the jetty server serving the Web UI.
Some requirements for the solution:
Must be a single self contained jar-file.
The camel integration is the main purpose, the Web UI is secondary
and only used for trouble shooting. No need for a high performance
web container since the Web ui is used by only a handful of users.
I have been struggling with this for a couple of days now and it feels like I am over complicating the solution. Help on how to solve this is greatly appreciated.
You could take a look at hawtio
http://hawt.io/
as that is how we do that, hawtio is a web console for java, and has plugins for Camel. Its built using angularjs, and uses REST to communicate with the local or remote Java JVMs. To make the REST calls easier we use Jolokia.
Jolokia requires an agent to be embedded in the JVM, eg where Camel runs. Then that helps with CORS et all. http://jolokia.org/reference/html/security.html#d0e2490

Adding a web interface (Spring MVC) to existing Java application

I have an existing Java application (Spring based) that currently does NOT have a web interface, nor does it run in a web container. It packages up nicely with a start program and just works.
What I need to do is add an administrative web interface for some administrative type things, retrieving real time metrics, and perhaps some graphs to give the users a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that everything is working. As we are a Spring shop, and some of our web applications already use Spring MVC it only makes sense to us, however, I'm not happy with the suggestions I've had from our internal Spring folks on how I should procede.
What would be the ideal way to bolt on this web interface?
Convert my application to a web application and have a web container launch the application. I not too keen on this approach is the web tier is really secondary to the primary application.
Create a separate project that packages as a war, embed Jetty in my existing app and have it load the war. I think I can use the context loader listener to make the root context of my application the parent to the web application spring context. This would involve breaking up my Maven project into 2 projects I believe. I can't use an existing web technology for communication between the web tier and the primary application as my primary application is not web enabled.
Embed Jetty and put the Spring MVC stuff directly in my app. While I've done this approach before, it does involve some ugliness - for instance exploding the JSP tag libs into my jar.
Any thoughts on some clean separation here?
Also of note, my current jar contains some utility applications which some shell scripts launch. Going a pure WAR route would make this not so easy, since I can't juse point java at my war file and choose a class to execute.
Thanks.
If it's true that web is just a minor addition the application, migrating it to WAR and deploying in servlet container might be an overkill. Embedding web server/servlet container looks much simpler, although it doesn't have to be Jetty or Tomcat. You can use web server built into JDK or write one on top of netty or even raw sockets. But that's a hell to maintain.
Yet another solution to springs to mymind when reading:
web interface for some administrative type things, retrieving real time metrics, and perhaps some graphs
Maybe you don't need an interface, but monitoring infrastructure instead? Check out JMX (Spring has great support for JMX) - and write a second web application that simply connects to your standalone Java app via JMX and displays the metrics in fancy way. Another approach is to expose JMX via Jolokia, which translates JMX to REST services.
This approach has several advantages:
monitoring API is universal, and you get it for free
you don't have to use web client, monitoring application is completely decoupled,
finally changes to your original application are minimal. Check out this proof of concept: 1, 2.
It really depends on the structure of your existing Java/Spring app and how much of an API it provides. I've done something similar to this and I approached it by creating a separate Spring MVC project and then specified the existing Java app as a JAR dependency.
This is easy with Maven (or Ivy, etc) and provides nice decoupling. The trick is to be able to write service classes in the Spring MVC app which then access data via your dependent Spring app via a simple DAO class. That's why I stated at the beginning, that it depends on the structure of your original Java app. It has to be able to provide an API for data access that you can then plug your DAO (impl) into.
If this is not easily done, then the next option I'd suggest is simply converting your Spring app to a Spring MVC app. I've worked on another app where we did this. Using Maven, its possible to specify that the build can create either a war file or a jar file (or both). So it can be deployed as either a webapp (via war) or a normal app (via jar). Yes, the jar version has a bit of bloat but its a worthwhile compromise.
The question of embedding Jetty or using Tomcat via a war file is a completely separate issue that has its pros and cons. It shouldn't affect the approach you take in architecting the web app in the first place.

Restlet vs Spring MVC for Restful web service

I'm researching how best to create a Restful web service on Google app engine. My end goal is to have an Android application call a web service on GAE to post and get data. At this point I not sure what the best approach is.
What I know at this point is Spring MVC 3 provide the ability to create web service but it does not provide a full implementation of JAX-RS. I also have read a few blog that talk about how Spring and Restlet can be integrated together. On the other side I have read that I could only use Restlet in GAE. I would also like provide a light web interface for users to view their posted data
So my questions are the following.
1. Should I just use Restlet.
2. Should I just use Spring MVC to provide my Restful web service.
3. Should I use Spring and Restlet together.
At this point I think I should invest my time in Restlet because that seems to be the best approach for calling web services in Android. I'm also debating if Spring MVC is just over kill.
Any thoughts would be helpful.
Have a look at the following similar questions:
Easiest frameworks to implement Java REST web services and Can anyone recommend a Java web framework that is based on MVC and supports REST?
I recently set up RESTlet on GAE and it was an absolute breeze! There are docs outlining the procedure on the RESTlet website and I was up and running RESTlet on GAE using the Google datastore within two hours.
The major downside is that performance of the Google data store for low volume apps is atrocious. Timeouts are not uncommon. (Google mandates a maximum 30 second request time and your app can easily take up half of that in coming out of hibernation if it hasn't been accessed recently)
Right now I am building another RESTful app and chose to go the Spring 3 MVC / Hibernate / MYSQL route. I am not new to Spring DI or MySQL, but I am new to Spring MVC and it is taking me days to work through all the issues I am encountering. I am disappointed in the quality of available documentation and I have not been able to find a reasonable and complete Spring 3 MVC RESTful CRUD tutorial anywhere. Argh.
I don't have experience with Restlet but Spring MVC 3.0 is quite powerful for building restful webservice AND webapps. So if you also plan for your service to be accessible through browsers then it is a great solution since your controllers can serve both apps and browsers.
Perhaps this is also possible with Restlet but I have not heard of its capabilities for building webapps.
Just beware that Spring has a high loading time. This means that you have to be careful to avoid slow responses from cold starts.

Creating Java Web Service using Google AppEngine

I'm trying to create a simple web service application where I can retrieve a collection of strings and store them into a data store on the AppEngine server.
I have knowledge in Java and barely any knowledge of Java Servlets and its WAR standards.
I would like to at least have some direction on how to create a web service using the Java technology AppEngine provides. I've searched but the articles are sparse and too lengthy while not providing any simple solutions.
I'd love it if I can create a web service using Java's annotations just like you can do in .NET with attributes.
I'd appreciate links to articles and guidance a full source answer is not required but would be appreciated.
No python based answers please.
IMO, there is no simple solution to build a Web Service on GAE with Java.
But, it's still achievable. Let's start with the Web Services we want to build.
In common usage the term refers to
clients and servers that communicate
over the Hypertext Transfer Protocol
(HTTP) protocol used on the web. Such
services tend to fall into one of two
camps: Big Web Services and
RESTful Web Services.
"Big Web Services" use SOAP/RPC format and RESTful Web Services use REST style one. You can read more about SOAP vs REST.
There are lots of Java open source Web Services frameworks out there. Most of them are generally based on the Java API for XML Web Services (JAX-WS), part of the Java EE platform.
JAX-WS is not supported by Google App Engine as specified in the list Will it play in App Engine. So forget about the "cool Java's annotations".
But, Restlet seems compatible with GAE. So if you think REST could be an option for you, I would go ahead and take a look at the Hello World tutorial of Restlet. Then, I'd go ahead and read the article on how to integrate Restlet with GAE.

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