Developing, managing and opening the hood of JVM REST services

Most modern applications targeting web or mobile use cases rely heavily on REST API backends. Being able to document, develop, deploy and scale such APIs has therefore become an essential capability in software development. In particular for agile teams aiming for continuous deployment and continuous monitoring such a setup is crucial. Swookiee* is a shining new open source runtime environment that was built with the main intention to reduce the architectural burden of developers and therefore enabling them to focus [even more] on the implementation of features, be they implemented in Java, Groovy or Scala.

This presentation introduces swookiee and shows how it provides JVM-based REST services powered by JAX-RS 2 with Jersey, Jetty and Jackson on top of the Equinox OSGi runtime. How clients and colleagues can understand and consume these services using swagger documentation. How a lightweight implementation of the OSGi RFC-182 enables remote management of swookiee instances through REST. How to increase introspection by feeding log output into logstash and kibana. And how to achieve total introspection into every aspect of your application using metrics from the number of calls by HTTP status code to measurements deep in the application like queue sizes or execution times. It even sports a basic OAuth2 provider, which enables you to provide customers out of the box with a modern authentication mechanism that isn't a pain.

* derived from “shaved wookiee” - http://swookiee.com