How to combine multiple Spring Boot web applications?

Question

I came across this tutorial "Building microservices with Spring Boot", which explains how to connect a user registration service with a webapp (=an UI for the registration). And I wondered if I could connect two webapps?

Say I have several components:

1. a forum
2. a chat
3. a blog system
4. ...

Each of them is a separately developed webapp with API endpoints, backend logic, enclosed Tomcat etc. I want to combine them within an app depending on what component is required. Maybe I even want to override certain aspects (e.g. configuration or a default template) within the enclosing project.

Any buzzwords for how to do this?

Answer 1

Basic idea of micro services is to avoid monolithic application architecture. In your scenario you are trying make it large single application. That means when chat goes down, forum goes down and so on. Thats the basic issue micro services trying to solve, try to avoid such situation.

Regardless, if you want to combine many applications you may need to publish chat, forum etc as separate maven artifact modules and then include each one of them as dependency in one sprint boot projec. Now you will have one application server and many modules running in it.