I've been working for the past few months on building Game On! a microservices-based application that is intended to show both what a microservices architecture looks like, and to make it easy for people to play with such a system without having to start from the ground up themselves.

We started with a best-guess set of services, and over time, it became pretty apparent that our first pass at a map building service (the Concierge) was both misleading in purpose and insufficient in function. It did serve its purpose, filling in for service discovery in a way, but we were growing beyond what the service could do.

I'm more familiar with Java than anything else, so I built the new Map API using JAX-RS and Liberty, but I also tried something new. In the beta drivers released in late 2015, Liberty added an API Discovery feature, which allows automatic generation of Swagger documentation from JAX-RS and Swagger annotations in the application.

I set up the new Map service using the beta driver and this beta feature, and started creating the skeleton elements that would form the API in Eclipse with WDT. As I made changes to the application files, all I had to do was refresh the browser to see an updated view of my API.

I really liked working this way: I could get a better feel of the usability of the API because I could see the whole view in one place. It also meant I was building up a useful set of models that I could then use with Jackson to streamline dealing with JSON payloads.