Architecture of my backend
Currently I´m involved in a personal project, working on the server side and on the client app. Now I´ll focus on the server side and I’ll explain my architecture and the reasons of my design. First of all, I would like to introduce my product without giving specific information. It´s a mobile app, a mix of social network and game and that in a second version the app will interact with LOT devices.
Two main reasons of my design for the architecture of the server:
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Scalable: as personal project, I cannot afford expensive servers and deploy lots of micro-services so the architecture is monolithic, but with good practices I’ll be able to split it into several applications and maybe into a set of micro-services for some specific feature.
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Learn new technologies: It´s a long term project, so one of the reasons is learn new technologies. But I´m not a fool, I have more experience with Java (and also I like Java) so I have to take advantage of that. Therefore the core will be write on JavaEE.
Core
I chose JavaEE–Java 8 because I feel comfortable with Java and along with a Full-application-server Wildfly 10 provides robustness, scalability and security difficult to achieve with other technologies. Initially it´s heavier than other options but luckily we have at our disposal AWS or Google Cloud.
Database
In my experience building back-ends for apps, the requests from app to database are about 90% read/write and 10% updates. The heavier updates are done by “jobs”, for example a massive expiration of premium accounts. A NoSql database as MongoDB is faster than sql databases in read/write and also MongoDB is based on documents so it’s easier to make changes in our model and design.
Real time messages
Users will be able to send messages in real time. For that, we will use a protocol based on sockets. I’m still hesitating between using Netty (Java) or Go language. I have little experience with Netty but it’s a safe bet. On the other hand I don’t have experience with Go but it attracts me a lot and this could be a good occasion to give it a try.
Also, I would like to comment that reject the option of Scala. I have been learning Scala on my own for around one year and I love it but I feel I’m not ready and I need too much time to improve my skills and this is a bit frustrating. Maybe if I had Scala programmers in my environment, I would have encouraged choose Scala.