AliBaba Backend

Introduction

This repo represents a backend API server, which communicates to clients over TCP. It was developed for a college project as a simulation of alibaba.

📖 Table of Contents

• Design
• Communication
• APIs

Design

The overall Design is a simple client/server design. The server is completely stateless and stores everything in a statefull database. All these components are Java Classes. Even the API requests/responses.

Communication

The communication between the client and the server is done through custom API. API requests and responses are passed as JSON objects. Each API has some required fields: username, method and route.

here's an example:

{
    "method": "POST",
    "username": "mohsen",
    "route": "/user/signup/",
    "company": "IranAir",
    "payload": {
      "password": "changeme",
    }
}

The function of method and route concepts are borrowed from REST and mean exactly the same. They define what you want to do with the server.

For POST, PUT and DELETE requests, you need to have a payload, which is a JSON object that provides the required fields for the server to complete your request. In this case password.

NOTE: You cannot send the JSON object prettified to the server, since the server will listen for an object only in one line. otherwise server won't recognize your request as a healthy JSON object.

‌ You can use this file as a client to send APIs and receive responses. it reads a JSON file (either prettified or not) as an API request.

APIs

Currently a list of available APIs are accessible on the release note of this project. But overally, you can think of every Java object in this project as a JSON object. For example when you want to add a ticket to the database, you fill the payload's value with a JSON object created by the fields of Ticket class:

{
    "method": "POST",
    "username": "mohsen",
    "company": "IranAir",
    "route": "/company/addticket/",
    "payload": {
        "ID": "98245",
        "price": 45363.46,
        "startDate": "2023.12.02",
        "endDate": "2023.12.03",
        "origin": "Do ghoz abad",
        "destination": "Tehran",
        "capacity": 130,
        "booked": 0
    }
}

Conclusion

This stack could be extended to whatever needs you might have, to be easily communicating over TCP, with a simple API structure.