Factory design pattern with Spring boot

Design patterns are the best solutions for repeated problems that occurs when developing an application.

Factory design pattern is a common solution employed in cases, where the application has multiple implementations of a service and at runtime based on a config we could select a particular implementation. An example for the above would be, we can have multiple types of message queues as Amazon SQS, Apache Kafka or ActiveMQ. Based on the configuration value provided or on the basis of the user input we might need to use a particular messaging queue service. Let’s see with an example of how to implement the example scenario in a spring boot application.

Let’s first create an interface for the messaging service.

The interface definition has 2 methods:

• getType
• sendMessage

The method sendMessage will hold the implementation of each messaging service to send a message to the queue. The other method getType will return a string that identifies the queue service like SQS, Kafka.

I created an enum, that specifies the messaging service name which will be used to return in the getType method in the interface.

The Sqs Service and Kafka Service implementation goes like this.

Now let’s write the factory method.

As you see in the factory method, we build a hashmap with the messaging service name as the key, and MessagingService implementation as the value. All the available implementation of MessagingService interface i.e KafkaMessagingService and SqsMessagingService are autowired by spring with the declaration:

private List<MessagingService> messagingServices;

Now let’s write a rest api and give the control to the clients to choose the messaging service(SQS or Kafka).

If we give a cURL request like this:

curl -X POST \
  http://localhost:8080/messaging/SQS \
  -H 'Accept: */*' \
  -H 'Content-Type: text/plain' \
  -H 'Host: localhost:8080' \
  -H 'cache-control: no-cache' \
  -d 'Some message for sqs'

The response comes with a 200 status.

Now when I want to add one more messaging service, say ActiveMq I will just add the following class.

Also I just need to add the enum in MessagingServiceType.java, so it goes as,

There is no need to modify any other existing class.

The complete code of this example is available in github here.