Java API server

[thaingo]

Does anyone implement the API server using Java instead of javascript (Node/Express)? If yes, could you please share your experience with us?

Thank you.

[cthanhnguyen]

+1

[jaraquistain]

Maybe not relevant but I consume a Scala API server. I don't think the implementation of the API itself really matters if you're using the proxy built into the boilerplate. As far as the web server is concerned the API is an opaque entity that it communicates with over HTTP(S)

[thaingo]

Thanks @jaraquistain for the sharing. Have you had any performance issue with the boilerplate so far? Could you please share a sample implementation of your Scala API server?

I have been investigating the other boilerplate, another POC, in which server side is Java/Scala and frontend - React, and without the proxy. However, I have had some performance issue with it and that made me worried. I experienced a quite big latency especially for the very first time I load a page.

What do you think?

[jaraquistain]

I can't really say much about the API server itself other than that we use Play, Akka and an Actors model to handle everything. Either way, server request latency is kind of outside the scope of this boilerplate. I, myself haven't really found latency to be much of a problem but maybe our site isn't as I/O intensive as yours. We may eventually forgo the proxy and hit the API directly but haven't needed to quite yet.

There are many things you can do, in general, to combat latency but the first step is identifying where the time lost actually comes from. E.G.

• If your bundled files are very large and you're losing a lot of time to asset download then you might want to make sure you're gzipping everything as well as serving out of a CDN. You could also try code-splitting so that the initial load only contains assets relevant to that page and everything else is lazily loaded as needed.
• If your data fetching via API is taking too long then you'll have to spend some time re-thinking how you're handling the requests on the server. Maybe you're doing some things synchronously when they could be async, accessing a database more often than is necessary, etc.
• Maybe you're making too many individual requests. A browser has a finite number of requests it can handle at the same time (6-8 I think depending on the browser) and if you're shooting off too many they could start to back up and hang until previous requests finish.

I apologize if that all seems like obvious and generic advice but there are just so many things that can cause latency

[thaingo]

Thanks for the sharing and your time, @jaraquistain. Appreciate your helpful input.