Even though one could say that it was more of an abstract presentation, I watched and enjoyed the InfoQ talk about microservice patterns by Mike Amundsen. Basically, he introduced patterns for microservices that could help design and transform them into hypermedia services. Even though the talk about hypermedia services isn’t new (especially with the increased presence of HATEOAS-driven REST APIs), it’s true that there hasn’t been enough discussion about the design patterns for the servers and clients which implement them. In particular, I liked his idea for a Representor pattern, which addressed a problem that I hadn’t even thought about. If you’re curious about the next evolution of communication within distributed architectures, then I would definitely recommend checking it out.
However, along with design patterns, another aspect of hypermedia services hasn’t been discussed in detail. In particular, there’s a general lack of proposed designs for code development and for database schemas (with the latter being the storage for the services’ vocabularies mentioned by Amundsen). Hmmm…what could we use to address this particular problem…Wait a minute! I know. What about MDD? In fact, I think that somebody has already written an article about this very subject of hypermedia!
…Sorry. I couldn’t help myself.