Hands On NoSQL - Integrating MongoDB & Spring MVC

Over the weekend, I took some time out of my side project to have a play with MongoDB. I was interested in looking at NoSQL and getting my head around some of the implementation details and had heard document oriented NoSQL DBs would be a good place to start.

So I stripped out the guts of a web app I have built, and dropped in a very simple domain model (the app just allows creation of resumes - I chose it as I wanted a model that made sense to use a document oriented DB rather than trying to crowbar in a model that is still relational) - then using Spring I looked at wiring all the MongoDB stuff. I was pleasantly suprised with how easy it was to drop it all in.

This also gave me a chance to finally play with CloudFoundry - I've had my beta account for a while now, but seeing as CF supports MongoDB and Spring/Java apps I figured this would be a perfect chance to test it out. Again, it was relatively easy to configure the app and CF to get the app up and running using the Clouds mongo DB service.

The other bit of experimentation I have done is rather than writing this up in a massive blog post, I have signed up for slideshare and uploaded a presentation with the details - you can check out the presentation embedded above - would love to hear feedback as to whether you prefer slideshows or traditional blog posts - for me its harder to get a lot of details in slides without over-crowding them, but then if its a very detailed walkthrough it can make for an over-long blog post.

As always, the complete source code for the app (Spring MVC web app with full mongoDB configuration, including config for both localhost and CloudFoundry deployment) is available here!