This is a tool which provides data on nearby asteroids using NASA Asteroids API

• Java 8
• Spring Boot
• Maven

Though this is only a PoC, here are some considerations for an MVP and further development:

• DB persistence: not necessary at the moment until there is a feature which requires it
• API Design: For an MVP the API-first mindset should be embraced from the very beginning, which means designing a good API which can scale and then coding the backend. Furthermore, an API Gateway / micro-gateway should be considered as soon as the development gets more ambitious
• Docker generally solves the "it works / doesn't work on my local environment" issue among other benefits. It also promotes a much more streamlined testing / release / deployment strategy. Developers would definitely benefit from this approach
• Testing: Automated testing must be implemented towards both front-facing and back-end facing APIs, mocking can be used for early unit testing. Regression and black-box testing should be easy to execute with a streamlined CI / CD strategy. For production use it is also recommended to run performance, volume, stress testing as well as eventually backup/recovery and even canary testing if the system becomes mission critical

• closestAsteroids: Shows 10 asteroids that passed the closest to Earth between two user-provided dates
• largestAsteroid: Shows characteristics of the largest asteroid (estimated diameter) passing Earth during a user-provided year

• The original development was done using IntelliJ IDEA 2022.2.1 (Ultimate Edition), but any Java-compatible IDE will do.
• This is basically a Spring Boot web application created by using Spring Initializr
• APIs are published and consumed by leveraging the RestTemplate built-in class
• No 3rd party dependencies are currently being used
• Basic response caching has been enabled and added by annotating methods to use the built-in Spring Boot Starter Cache
• Some further development suggestions:
  • Add error handling
  • Use of developer API key instead of DEMO_KEY
  • Create generic handler for API calls to reduce code
  • Externalize configuration
  • Add more robust caching solution such as Redis, Couchbase, etc.

The application can be started both from an IDE of your choice or from the command line:

./mvnw spring-boot:run

You can also package and run it using a docker container:

./mvnw package
docker build -t springio/gs-spring-boot-docker .
docker run -p 8080:8080 springio/gs-spring-boot-docker

The following 2 endpoints are available:

http://<host>:<port>/closestAsteroids.json?startDate=<startDate>&endDate=<endDate>
http://<host>:<port>/largestAsteroid.json?year=<year>

Considerations:

• Response is a JSON document
• Date format is always: YYYY-MM-DD
• The NASA API has a hard limit of 7 days for retrieving data from it
• This PoC uses the DEMO_KEY to retrieve data, for further use you need to replace this with a NASA developer key

This repo includes GitHub Actions configuration for deploying to Heroku Cloud. This will happen automatically when merging into master.
Sample endpoints:

https://young-wave-56035.herokuapp.com/closestAsteroids.json?startDate=2016-09-07&endDate=2016-09-10
https://young-wave-56035.herokuapp.com/largestAsteroid.json?year=2003.