Ed McCormic Source on GitHub
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Spring Boot and Java deep dives

Products REST BFF over gRPC

A review of an existing Spring Boot gRPC + REST project, with best-practice fixes and a Postgres backing store.

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Problem

An existing Spring Boot project exposed /api/products over REST by calling a gRPC service. Before building on it, I wanted to check it against best practices.

Scope

  • Review the codebase and list issues
  • Fix the top four findings
  • Map gRPC status codes to HTTP ProblemDetail
  • Set deadlines on every gRPC client call
  • Add a Postgres database in Docker

Tech stack

Spring Boot with spring-boot-starter-grpc-client, Gradle, Docker Compose, and Postgres.

Changelog

  • 2026-09-16: First commit
  • 2026-09-23: Review, fixes, and Postgres added