Books Library API

https://github.com/brnSilva/books-library-api

Overview

The Books Library API is a Spring Boot application designed to manage a library of books. It provides endpoints for creating, updating, retrieving, and deleting book records, as well as generating AI insights for books using the OpenAI API.

Build and Run Instructions

Prerequisites

• Java 17 or later
• Maven 3.6.0 or later

Build the application using Maven

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/brnSilva/books-library-api
cd books-library-api

Environment Variables

The application requires several environment variables to be set for integration with the OpenAI API. These variables have default values but you need to set the external.ai.api.key as it is a sensitive piece of information.

Variable Name	Description	Default Value
OPENAI_API_URL	URL for the OpenAI API	https://api.openai.com/v1/chat/completions
OPENAI_API_KEY	API key for accessing the OpenAI API	No default value, must be provided
OPENAI_API_MODEL	Model to be used for AI insights	gpt-4o-mini
OPENAI_API_ROLE	Role to be used for AI insights	developer
OPENAI_API_PROMPT	Prompt template for generating AI insights	Please generate a detailed and engaging summary, including key plot points, character development, and significant themes. The summary should be up to 100 words for this book: Title: %s. Author: %s.

You can set these variables in your application.properties or in an .env file in the root of the project.

# OpenAI
external.ai.api.url=${OPENAI_API_URL:https://api.openai.com/v1/chat/completions}
external.ai.api.key=${OPENAI_API_KEY}
external.ai.api.model=${OPENAI_API_MODEL:gpt-4o-mini}
external.ai.api.role=${OPENAI_API_ROLE:developer}
external.ai.api.prompt=${OPENAI_API_PROMPT:Please generate a detailed and engaging summary, including key plot points, character development, and significant themes. The summary should be up to 100 words for this book: Title: %s. Author: %s.}

Build the application using Maven:

mvn clean install

Run the application using Maven:

mvn spring-boot:run

Alternatively, you can run the application using the generated JAR file:

java -jar target/books-library-api-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar

API Documentation

The API documentation is available via Swagger UI. Once the application is running, you can access it at the following URL:

http://localhost:8080/swagger-ui.html

Decisions developing:

Spring Boot: It is simple and easy to program and integrate with various components. OpenAI/Swagger: It is extremely simply to use to documentation and provide a clear and interactive interface for API consumers. OpenAI: I looked for free AI APIs to use in this project, but OpenAI made development much easier with documentation that was easy to read and understand. Exception Handling: Custom exceptions are used to provide meaningful error messages and HTTP status codes and, in addition, centralize exceptions in a single place for future maintenance. Pagination: Implemented for efficient handling and retrieval of large datasets. Frontend thanks. It is lighter to fetch smaller blocks of records. Filtering: I opted for a general listing filter with query parameters to allow searching by author OR title, facilitating flexible and efficient search capabilities on the Front end.