Better, Faster, Lighter Java

Chapter 10. Extending jPetStore

The previous chapter introduced the workhorse Simple Spider service with its console-based user interface and web service endpoint. In this chapter, we see how easy it is to add the Spider to an existing application, jPetStore. Some might argue the jPetStore already has a search tool; but that tool only searches the database of animals in the pet store, not all the pages on the site. Our customer needs to search the entire site; jPetStore has at least one page in the current version that isn’t searchable at all (the Help page) and text describing the different animals that doesn’t show up in a query.

We’ll add the Spider to the jPetStore, paying careful attention to what we need to change in the code in order to enable the integration. In addition, we will replace the existing persistence layer with Hibernate. By carefully adhering to our core principles, our code will be reusable, and since the jPetStore is based on a lightweight framework (Spring), it doesn’t make unreasonable demands on our code in order to incorporate the search capability or the new persistence layer. Coming and going, the inclusion will be simple and almost completely transparent.

A Brief Look at the Existing Search Feature

The search feature that comes with jPetStore takes one or more keywords separated by spaces and returns a list of animals with a name or category that includes the term. A search for “dog” turns up six results, while a search for “snake” nets one. However, a ...