Alpine

An opinionated scaffolding library that jump-starts Java projects with an API-first design, secure defaults, and minimal dependencies. Alpine came about due to many commonalities between several of my personal and professional projects.

Alpine provides the basis for quickly developing a 'Thin Server Architecture'. This type of architecture shifts the role of webapps to being API providers with little or no responsibility for server-side HTML rendering. This type of architecture is perfect for client-side rendered webapps that rely heavily on JSON, for Single Page Applications (SPA), and to power back-ends that drive mobile applications.

Design Features

• API-First Design - Alpine assumes an API-first design where REST (via JAX-RS) is at its core. The servers resources are stateless and do not rely on sessions. JSON Web Tokens (JWT) are used to maintain some state and are signed with an HMAC.

• Authentications - Alpine supports multiple types of principals including LDAP users and API keys, both of which can be integrated into teams for access control.

• Simplified Event System - Alpine can perform parallel processing of tasks using an asynchronous pub/sub model. It can easily scale to consume as much or as little of available resources as necessary.

• Secure By Default - All REST resources are secure by default, requiring authentication to access them. Gone are the days of forgetting to protect a resource.

• Flexible Persistences - Uses JDO, the most flexible Java persistence specification available. I never understood how JPA, a small subset of JDO, is viewed as progress. It's not.

• Minimal Dependencies - Too many frameworks unnecessary increase the attack surface of applications built using them. Even a simple Hello World application is often susceptible to attack from the use of vulnerable components or poorly configured frameworks. Alpine includes what is necessary for a modern app, nothing more.

• Control - Frameworks often force developers higher up the stack, freeing them from low-level details. While this is certainly a huge win for productivity, developers often don't understand how their app actually works. Alpine does not do this. It provides standards-based APIs in a pre-packaged library giving developers both full control over their app, as well as a productivity jumpstart.

Application Features

The following features are free and require little or no coding just for using Alpine.

• Authentication for Internal (managed) and LDAP users
• Authentication via API keys
• Authentication via JWT
• Stateless API-first design
• REST resources are locked down by default (requires authentication)
• Configurable enforcement of authentication and authorization
• Built-in support for BCrypt for the hashing and salting of passwords for managed users
• Built-in models for managed users, LDAP users, API keys, and groups (called teams in Alpine)
• Built-in and consistent support for pagination and ordering via REST
• Embedded database
• Flexible persistence supporting RDBMS and non-RDBMS datastores (via Datanucleus JDO)
• Separate application and audit logs
• Scheduled and on-demand execution of parallel tasks via asynchronous pub/sub event framework
• Extendable and centralized application configuration
• Lightweight upgrade framework can optionally perform automatic upgrades on startup
• Built-in input validation (JSR 303 & 349) for all REST resources and default model classes
• Defensive security mechanisms for enabling:
  • Click-jacking protection (X-Frame-Options) (RFC-7034)
  • Content Security Policy (Level 1 and 2)
  • HTTP Public Key Pinning (HPKP) (RFC-7469)
  • HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) (RFC-6797)
  • Whitelist and Blacklist URL filters

Build Features

These build-time features are inherited simply by using the Alpine pom

• Simplifies dependency management. Simply including Alpine as a dependency is all that's required
• Analysis of third-party components for known vulnerabilities via Sonatype OSS Index & Retire.js
• Automatic creation of CycloneDX BoM incorporating all direct and transitive dependencies used
• Support for HPE Fortify Source Code Analyzer (SCA) (requires Fortify license to use)
• Alpine apps are automatically built as WARs
• Optional packaging as an executable WAR containing an embedded Jetty container

Compiling

mvn clean install

Maven Usage

<!-- Place the parent right after the <project> root node
     to inherit all the goodies from alpine-parent pom -->
<parent>
    <groupId>us.springett</groupId>
    <artifactId>alpine-parent</artifactId>
</parent>

<dependencies>
    <!-- Add the alpine dependency -->
    <dependency>
        <groupId>us.springett</groupId>
        <artifactId>alpine</artifactId>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

Copyright & License

Alpine is Copyright (c) Steve Springett. All Rights Reserved.

Permission to modify and redistribute is granted under the terms of the Apache License 2.0

Alpine makes use of several other open source libraries. Please see the NOTICE.txt file for more information.