Select Core technologies

[pmhsfelix]

Select the technologies to use on Core:

• [ ] SpringMVC vs WebFlux
• [ ] R2DBC vs JDBC-based vs Spring Data
• other?

[jmchamica]

Proposal

Core's Requirements

• its implementation serves as useful academic material, referred to by lecturers and consulted by students
• high QoS

Taking into consideration

• the value of the tool as academic reference

  • JDBC could provide great examples for students, as its lower level nature makes it easy to understand what is going on (creating a connection, sending commands over, etc)
  • JPA hides a meaningful part of the complexity and might be very restricted to its implementation, meaning the verbosely documented collection of classes/methods may not be representative of all ORMs
  • using all dependencies as Spring modules (MVC+Spring Data, i.e.) might force students to read Spring's documentation to exhaustion if they want to understand the Core's source code. The main difficulty would shift from understanding the Core's architecture and/or basic concepts (i.e. DBMS interaction) to how familiar the student is with Spring.

• the right tool for the job

  • is built around concepts that may be important to the development of the service, such as the asynchronous question
  • WebFlux is a more modern and possibly tidy approach rather than its counter part, Spring MVC
  • R2DBC's non-blocking nature fits really well with the intended architecture

Conclusion

WebFlux and JDBI could be a great middle ground. More specifically, JDBI presents us with a cleaner solution than plain old JDBC while maintaining the ability to control the connection with what they call handles, possibly providing a good source for academic purposes. Further, a less verbose implementation might be easier to wrap around coroutines.