[TL;DR; Get started using Dgraph’s Slash GraphQL product and connect to a Spring Boot application which will act as a simple RESTful recommendation service.]

Back in the early 2000s, I was working on a project implementing an eCommerce solution by Art Technology Group (ATG), now owned by Oracle. The ATG Dynamo product was an impressive solution as it included a persistence layer and a scenarios module. At the time, companies like Target and Best Buy used the Dynamo solution, leveraging the scenario module to provide recommendations to the customer.

As an example, the Dynamo eCommerce solution was smart enough to remember when a customer added a product to their cart and later removed it. As an incentive, the scenario server could be designed to offer the same customer a modest discount on a future visit if they re-added the product into their cart and purchased it within the next 24 hours.

Since those days, I have always wanted to create a simple recommendations engine, which is my goal for this publication.

About the Recommendations Example

I wanted to keep things simple and create some basic domain objects for the recommendations engine. In this example, the solution will make recommendations for musical artists and the underlying Artist object is quite simple:

@AllArgsConstructor
@NoArgsConstructor
@Data
public class Artist {
   private String name;
}

In a real system, there would be so many more attributes to track. However, in this example, the name of the artist will suffice.

#recommendation-systems #java #spring-boot #graphql #graph-data #web-development #programming #software-architecture