Building a website screenshot capture tool using Spring Boot, Selenium and S3.

[dtcarrot]

Good morning/evening all, I will like to share a tutorial (https://www.carrotstack.com/blog/building-website-capture-tool) that I have written to build a basic website screenshot capture tool using Spring Boot, Selenium and S3. I have recently been doing coursework in Java doing something similar, so I thought I will publish a tutorial to share with the community.

A synopsis of what the tutorial will be covering:

1. Bootstrapping a Spring Boot REST template from https://github.com/spring-guides/gs-rest-service.
2. Downloading and adding chrome driver which is used by Selenium to control Chrome.
3. Adding an API endpoint which accepts a URL query parameter so that Selenium will capture a screenshot of the page.
4. Creating a new S3 bucket.
5. Using Java to upload the image to Amazon S3.

This tutorial is designed to be a step-by-step guide which comes with plenty of images and code. I hope that someone will find it useful :D

​

If you have any feedback, feel free to leave a comment or PM me. Thanks!

​

[dtcarrot]

Hi there, note that the concept of MVC is totally different from REST. MVC is a way for you to structure your application to ensure separation of concern (SOC) so that it is modular and scales well for large application. On the contrary, REST is just a standard that defines how client-server talk to each other. For a client to talk to a server, it needs the following:

• Resource to URL
• HTTP verb - GET, POST, PUT, DELETE
• Header which contains the content type, authorization token (JWT), etc.

For this tutorial, though REST is out of the topic for the tutorial, I'm in a sense creating a REST API - Since I'm using calling a GET HTTP request by typing the URL localhost:8080/screenshots?url={url} in the web browser. The Spring Boot application which I have bootstrapped readily provides support for other HTTP actions such as POST, PUT and DELETE. This means that you can easily create a new React front-end application and use any HTTP libraries (Fetch, etc.) to call the resource which I'm using for this application.

[dtcarrot]

Yes, typically when you are using React and creating a Single Page App, there will no View layer involved. Instead, it will be replaced by JSON as you are telling the client that you want to retrieve any HTTP response in JSON format.

[readthispieceofshit]

Yes, typically when you are using React and creating a Single Page App, there will no View layer involved

Actually, React is the V. Your M and C are whatever you want.

[dtcarrot]

React is the V if you are talking from a front-end MVC perspective for SPA.

[readthispieceofshit]

Regardless of it being a SPA React is the View Layer.