Vert.x 3 and PostgreSQL JSON type

One of the in­ter­est­ing fea­tures of NoSQL data­bases is their schema-​less mode of op­er­a­tion. This fea­ture is very use­ful dur­ing project pro­to­typ­ing and early de­vel­op­ment since at early the stages of de­vel­op­ment of projects all data struc­tures are not clear or have been de­fined yet. The rea­son of this post is not to dis­cuss about that sub­ject, but to show that some­times you can also use NoSQL with a more tra­di­tional data­base en­gine like Post­greSQL.

Since ver­sion 9.3 there is sup­port for JSON how­ever with ver­sion 9.4 there is even bet­ter sup­port with the new type JSONB. I will now show how to use the basic JSON type in a sim­ple REST ap­pli­ca­tion writ­ten with Vert.x3:

Now all you need to do is play with this REST ser­vice, for this you can use curl to cre­ate a sale:

$ curl \
    -i \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -X POST \
    -d '{"id": 1, "customer_name": "John", "items": {"description": "milk", "quantity": 4}}' \
    http://localhost:8080/sales

HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Content-Length: 0

And if you want to read that new doc­u­ment:

$ curl -i -H "Accept: application/json" -X GET http://localhost:8080/sales/1
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
content-type: application/json
Content-Length: 75

{"id":1,"customer_name":"John","items":{"description":"milk","quantity":4}}