Context
Let’s imagine you are building an online store that uses the Microservice architecture pattern and that you are implementing the product details page. You need to develop multiple versions of the product details user interface:
- HTML5/JavaScript-based UI for desktop and mobile browsers - HTML is generated by a server-side web application
- Native Android and iPhone clients - these clients interact with the server via REST APIs
In addition, the online store must expose product details via a REST API for use by 3rd party applications.
A product details UI can display a lot of information about a product. For example, the Amazon.com details page for POJOs in Action displays:
- Basic information about the book such as title, author, price, etc.
- Your purchase history for the book
- Availability
- Buying options
- Other items that are frequently bought with this book
- Other items bought by customers who bought this book
- Customer reviews
- Sellers ranking
- …
Since the online store uses the Microservice architecture pattern the product details data is spread over multiple services. For example,
- Product Info Service - basic information about the product such as title, author
- Pricing Service - product price
- Order service - purchase history for product
- Inventory service - product availability
- Review service - customer reviews …
Consequently, the code that displays the product details needs to fetch information from all of these services.
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