PandaX

This is the project we have been asked to realize for our Application Interoperability with Web Services course @ Efrei Paris.

It is a fairly simple application we created in about two weeks ; it essentially is a user media repository REST API in which users can add their possessions and comments.

Technical requirements

This projects needs

• Java > 11
  • the project is configured to target version 11
• A MySQL database with the PandaX script
  • a user must be provided ; persistence.xml file expects test|password as a userfor the database pandax
• Tomcat > 8.5
  • previous versions have compatibility issues with hibernate

Tech

We made several choices regarding our technical stack ;

• Use Maven to ease interoperability between team members, OSes and IDEs
• Use Java 11, the current Java LTS version
• Use Tomcat
• Use Hibernate as a JPA provider
• Use JJWT as our JWT provider
• Use Postman
• Use MySQL
• Use JAX-RS

What our project does

It is possible to CRUD publishers, media types, users, medias, comments and user possessions.

Some more requests where made to select a certain type of resource rergarding another (like all medias created by a certain user).

Finally, all our routes were successfully tested on Postman.

A token must be requested and issued before each request to authenticate the user (see the appropriate section).

Postman

All the Postman requests are sorted by resource.

They are made to be chained and thus they memorize their result (one way or another) into variables.

At the beginning, there are three variables :

• URL, which represents the REST API URL
• Login, which reprents the target user’s login (in the USER table)
• Password, which reprents the target user’s password (in the USER table)

The first request that should be executed is Security → Auth – Obtain token ; it will save the obtained token into the token postman variable (using the test script).

The requests do have an order that needs to be observed to obtain the desired results from Postman the Create one and Get one should always be executed firsthand, before any other request because

• Create one will ask the API to create a resource and return the id, which will be saved (used in Get one, Delete one)
• Get one will use the previously saved id to get the resource and save it in another variable (used in Modify one)

Moreover, the resources themselves must be created / delete in a certain order as a consequence of the database constraints ;

• MediaType & Publisher & User
• Media
• Comment

The order to delete is reversed.