Real-time-auction

Welcome to Real-Time Auction Web App, a dynamic platform that brings auctions to life with real-time updates and seamless user experience. Built on a robust microservices architecture using Kafka and Spring Boot, coupled with cache integration for optimized performance, our application ensures smooth and scalable auctioning experiences.

• Motivation
• Features
• Building and running
• Architecture

[Video demo]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfGrs4omHFg

Motivation

Conventional auction systems face limitations in real-time functionality and encounter scalability and performance issues, particularly during peak traffic. To solve this, our objective is to create a real-time auction application utilizing Kafka, Spring Boot microservices.

Features

• Seamlessly register, create auctions, and place bids on multiple auctions simultaneously using our intuitive REST API.
• Kafka topics for real-time bid processing, ensuring efficient handling and synchronization of bids across the platform.
• Experience real-time bid updates from specific auctions through Server-Sent Events (SSE) from the backend, keeping users informed of the latest bidding activity.
• Enhance performance by implementing database record caching, reducing I/O operations to the database and improving overall responsiveness.
• Our backend is fully dockerized, making deployment a breeze and providing scalability and portability across different environments.

Building and Running the project

Getting started with this project is a breeze, thanks to its Docker-based setup. Follow these simple steps to kick off this app:

1. Install Docker: Ensure Docker is installed on your system. You can download and install Docker from the official website.

2. Build Docker Images: Execute the provided bash script to build the Docker images for frontend & backend app. If you're on a Linux machine or using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), simply run the script to initiate the process. ./build_docker_images.sh

3. Start the containers
   docker-compose up Ensure Docker is running in the background. This command will download the required images for services such as Zookeeper, Kafka, and MySQL. The Spring app may take a few attempts to start as the database and Kafka services need time to initialize. After a few retries, you'll see log messages indicating the backend Spring app is running successfully.

   Note: The backend app image isn't compatible with Mac ARM architecture. For testing, please use Windows/Linux with x86 architecture Docker setups.

4. Access the backend

   By default, the Spring backend runs on localhost:8080 You can test the backend functionality by accessing this URL in your web browser or using API testing tools.

   REST API is documented here - REST API

Please make sure you clear all your cookie before lanching, the web app will check for your cookie with the "auction-userID" key to check to see if you are logged in or not to proceed. Thanks!

Architecture