Building a Patient Management System with Spring Boot: My Learning Journey

Introduction

I am currently diving into Spring Boot and building a Patient Management System as a hands-on learning project. My goal is to understand microservices architecture while applying industry best practices to create clean, maintainable, and scalable code. Through this project, I am exploring different technologies, patterns, and tools to enhance my development skills. In this post, I’ll share my progress on the patient-service, detailing how I structured it, the features implemented, and my roadmap for the next stages of development.

Setting Up the Patient Service

As I learn and build, I have structured the patient-service to follow a modular and maintainable design pattern. It consists of the following core components:

1. Controllers: These handle API requests, process incoming data, and return appropriate responses.
2. Services: Contain the business logic, ensuring separation of concerns from the controllers.
3. Entities: Represent the database models, defining patient attributes such as name, age, contact details, and medical history.
4. DTOs (Data Transfer Objects): Used to transfer data between layers, ensuring security and efficiency by exposing only necessary fields.
5. Repositories: Manage database interactions using Spring Data JPA, allowing for seamless CRUD operations.
6. Exception Handling: Provides a centralized mechanism for handling errors gracefully, improving debugging and user experience.

Implementing CRUD Operations

At this stage, the patient-service supports basic CRUD operations, enabling the following functionalities:

1. Creating a new patient record: Users can add patient details, which are stored securely in the database.
2. Viewing patient details: Retrieve patient information using unique identifiers.
3. Updating patient information: Modify existing records to reflect changes in medical data, contact details, or other attributes.
4. Deleting patient records: Remove patients from the system when necessary, ensuring proper data management.

Learning Docker and Deploying the Application

To make deployment easier and simulate real-world scenarios, I have been learning Docker and its role in containerizing applications. As part of this process:

1. I created a Dockerfile for the patient-service to package the application with its dependencies.
2. I am using a PostgreSQL Docker image to serve as the database, ensuring consistency across development and production environments.
3. I have set up docker-compose to orchestrate both the application and database, making it easier to test and debug locally.

This hands-on experience with Docker is helping me understand containerization concepts, deployment strategies, and the benefits of using Docker in a microservices architecture.

Next Steps in My Learning Journey

As I continue building this system, I plan to enhance it further with additional features and services:

1. Authentication Service: I will implement authentication and authorization using Spring Security and JWT, ensuring secure access to patient data.
2. Other Microservices: I plan to explore and develop complementary services such as appointment management and billing, expanding the system's functionality.
3. Frontend Development: To provide a user-friendly interface, I will build a frontend using React or Next.js, improving the overall user experience.
4. gRPC for Microservices Communication: Instead of traditional REST-based inter-service communication, I will experiment with gRPC, which offers high performance and efficient data exchange between microservices.

Conclusion

This project is providing me with invaluable hands-on experience in Spring Boot, Docker, PostgreSQL, and microservices architecture. As I continue to learn and refine my skills, I will document my progress and share key insights along the way.