Enterprise Java

Reactive Spring Webflux with AWS DynamoDB

AWS has released AWS SDK for Java version 2, the SDK now supports non-blocking IO for the API calls of different AWS services. In this post I will be exploring using the DynamoDB API’s of the AWS SDK 2.x and using Spring Webflux stack to expose a reactive endpoint – this way the application is reactive end to end and presumably should use resources very efficiently (I have plans to do some tests on this set-up as a follow up).

Details of the Application

It may be easier to simply look at the code and follow it there – it is available in my GitHub repo.

The application is a simple one – to perform CRUD operation on a Hotel entity represented using the following Kotlin code:

data class Hotel(
        val id: String = UUID.randomUUID().toString(),
        val name: String? = null,
        val address: String? = null,
        val state: String? = null,
        val zip: String? = null
)

I want to expose endpoints to save and retrieve a hotel entity and to get the list of hotels by state.

Details of the AWS SDK 2

The package names of the AWS SDK 2 api’s all start with “software.amazon.awssdk” prefix now, the client to interact with DynamoDB is created using code along these lines:

import software.amazon.awssdk.auth.credentials.DefaultCredentialsProvider
import software.amazon.awssdk.regions.Region
import software.amazon.awssdk.services.dynamodb.DynamoDbAsyncClient

val client: DynamoDbAsyncClient = DynamoDbAsyncClient.builder()
        .region(Region.of(dynamoProperties.region))
        .credentialsProvider(DefaultCredentialsProvider.builder().build())
        .build()

Once the DynamoDbAsyncClient instance is created, any operation using this client returns a Java 8 CompletableFuture type. For eg. in saving a Hotel entity:

val putItemRequest = PutItemRequest.builder()
        .tableName("hotels")
        .item(HotelMapper.toMap(hotel))
        .build()
        
val result: CompletableFuture<PutItemResponse> =
        dynamoClient.putItem(putItemRequest)

and in retrieving a record by id:

val getItemRequest: GetItemRequest = GetItemRequest.builder()
        .key(mapOf(Constants.ID to AttributeValue.builder().s(id).build()))
        .tableName(Constants.TABLE_NAME)
        .build()

val response: CompletableFuture<GetItemResponse> = dynamoClient.getItem(getItemRequest)

CompletableFuture provides a comprehensive set of functions to transform the results when available.

Integrating with Spring Webflux

Spring Webflux is a reactive web framework. The non-blocking IO support in AWS SDK 2 now makes it possible to write an end to end reactive and non-blocking applications with DynamoDB. Spring Webflux uses reactor-core to provide reactive streams support and the trick to integrating with AWS SDK 2 is to transform the Java 8 CompletableFuture to a reactor-core type, the following way when retrieving an item from DynamoDB by id:

val getItemRequest: GetItemRequest = GetItemRequest.builder()
        .key(mapOf(Constants.ID to AttributeValue.builder().s(id).build()))
        .tableName(Constants.TABLE_NAME)
        .build()

return Mono.fromCompletionStage(dynamoClient.getItem(getItemRequest))
        .map { resp ->
            HotelMapper.fromMap(id, resp.item())
        }

Spring Webflux expects the return types of the different web endpoint method signatures to be of reactive types, so a typical endpoint for getting say a list of hotels is the following:

@RequestMapping(value = ["/hotels"], method = [RequestMethod.GET])
fun getHotelsByState(@RequestParam("state") state: String): Flux<Hotel> {
    return hotelRepo.findHotelsByState(state)
}

Spring Webflux also supports a functional way to describe the API of the application, so an equivalent API to retrieve a hotel by its id, but expressed as a functional DSL is the following:

@Configuration
class HotelAdditionalRoutes {

    @Bean
    fun routes(hotelRepo: HotelRepo) = router {
        GET("/hotels/{id}") { req ->
            val id = req.pathVariable("id")
            val response: Mono<ServerResponse> = hotelRepo.getHotel(id)
                    .flatMap { hotel ->
                        ServerResponse.ok().body(BodyInserters.fromObject(hotel))
                    }
            response.switchIfEmpty(ServerResponse.notFound().build())
        }
    }
}

Conclusion

AWS SDK 2 makes it simple to write an end to end reactive and non-blocking applications. I have used Spring Webflux and AWS SDK 2 dynamo client to write such an application here. The entire working sample is available in my GitHub repo – https://github.com/bijukunjummen/boot-with-dynamodb, and has instructions on how to start up a local version of DynamoDB and use it for testing the application.

Published on Java Code Geeks with permission by Biju Kunjummen, partner at our JCG program. See the original article here: Reactive Spring Webflux with AWS DynamoDB

Opinions expressed by Java Code Geeks contributors are their own.

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