Redis Hackathon Submission

I participated in a Redis Hackathon hosted on Dev.to which required use of the Redis Stack. Anyone familiar with Redis knows it for its primary use case as a cache, with popular adoption as a primary database because of its ease-of-use and high developer happiness as part of the ecosystem’s DX metric.

The hackathon started at the beginning of August but I started late and had to balance free time against work time. The submission deadline was August 29 at 7 PM. Though I didn’t have a finalized submission, just for participating I’ve gotten a $500 credit for Redis Stack!

Redis Stack

The Redis Stack is a distributed system! Redis has multiple projects, meaning multiple parts of these applications can run in a distributed system to provide a single endpoint for a full-featured cache. Redis means Remote Dictionary server, which is what they call the initial redis app which is historically compared to memcached.

Redis Stack is made up of several components, licensed as follows:

Redis Stack Server, which combines open source Redis with RediSearch, RedisJSON, RedisGraph, RedisTimeSeries, and RedisBloom, is licensed under the Redis Source Available License (RSAL).

RedisInsight is licensed under the Server Side Public License (SSPL).

Using these combined systems, I made a microservice app which enabled me to create an endpoint to easily store some data for the michaellamb.dev Discord bot. The project I came up with involved integrating Midjourney image generation and a frontend.

The progress I did make

The following sections will be dated entries with commits SHAs and descriptions of the changes.

August 17

1 commit

• a013eaac3177db02ccb9918f27d5e01d1016f3d0 message: initial commit

This is just the basic initialization of the app. It builds and runs. Swagger is available.

August 20

1 commit

• b396c77de5e795e8074d7fd50b5c8bfd294d6cab

message: creates example People repository

I’m following along with the Stack Spring tutorial here to implement some basic functionality. This includes using the skeleton app repo as a reference.

Progress here includes connecting to the Redis Stack. Of course, the password has been changed since this is open source. A future commit will rename the application.properties file to indicate it is an example only, after another commit which adds an entry for application.properties in .gitignore.

August 22

3 commits

• fc68711d291160dac4dd39f3c285afaa8fdf0387

message: ignore application.properties

• 6de183fb46e2990f275eaea32879039c9e95d2cc

message: Update .gitignore

• c134d264139e4020173529890ec2babfb210d75b

message: Rename application.properties to last-application.properties

This does the things I said in the last description.

August 23

• fae387b0f6a166aacd3e9bb829c120de4add3c01

message: migrate to springdoc

Springfox doesn’t support something in Spring 2.7.0 so I migrated the project to Springdoc.

• 12f46bc6f9919da4f10b7543e19c1ede0253a270

message: replaced import

Fixed an erroneous import in the Person domain class.

• a8a39c4d5c56c4cae7b8bfe53ca66e556933707d

message: implement RedisDocumentRepository operations

This adds functionality around the Person objects using RedisDocumentRepository to generate boilerplate code. We can easily return an Iterable<Person> with whatever data points we can imagine because of the power of Redis. The OM library gives us the ability to stub basic methods. We can use these to query Redis for data.

• fc69956ea1863d87069c9a106cb834c335a8aaba

message: add controller operations

This exposes the functionality of the PeopleRepository as an API.

August 24

• 0ae2657d51e8a8e1cb1e50eb38f7b3c32ad04a07
• e9cfbb73508d43b399018c22a22c33a462e0e298

message: refactor Person

These chisel down some of the fields on the Person class

• 25f2c603027790293b238d6c875aa19baeb247dc

message: remove loadTestData CommandLineRunner

This is tutorial code and should be removed before further development.

• 4469131638057b4fbc8f4b57e832b47cf07b6920

message: fix build

I’m not perfect.

Reflection

I got a good deal of exposure to Redis OM Spring and more experience with RedisInight, the GUI used to inspect Redis databases. I ran into issues with the meta-model generation, I’m not sure if that was because VS Code doesn’t know about meta-modeling or if I was missing a Maven compilation step. Overall, Redis OM Spring seems like it’s headed in a good direction!

My code is not production ready but it’s progress.

Music Corner