From PHP to Java: My Journey Refactoring E‑Commerce with Spring Boot

Preparation

Hello, I am Jia Xiaowa from Mafengwo's travel platform R&D team. I was a PHP engineer and decided to rebuild the product and order core functions in Java after hearing the company’s tech stack shift.

After two days of intensive study, I learned Java basics, Spring Boot, Lombok, Druid, Maven, and various annotations.

Practical Digging

Spring Boot simplifies configuration, eliminating XML files. A simple demo prints a greeting: System.out.println("Hello, world!"); Using Lombok’s @Getter and @Setter annotations saves me from writing hundreds of accessor methods for the product entity.

To bridge existing PHP APIs, we created a PHP gateway that wraps PHP endpoints as HTTP services.

For database connections we adopted Alibaba’s Druid pool, which offers extensive monitoring and logging.

We also configured Maven for dependency management and used SkipperClient to retrieve DB credentials from the service registry.

Filling While Digging

We leveraged Spring’s IoC container: annotating a class with @Service registers it as a bean, and @Resource injects dependencies, avoiding manual setters.

When encountering NullPointerException, we learned that the consuming class must also be managed by Spring.

Exception handling was refined by letting the outermost layer catch and log errors, avoiding duplicated logs.

Data format mismatches between PHP’s snake_case and Java’s camelCase were solved with @JSONField (FastJSON) and @JsonProperty (Jackson) annotations.

Launch

Before going live we added a feature‑toggle switch to quickly roll back traffic if issues arise.

During launch we faced an emoji‑related MySQL error because the table used utf8 instead of utf8mb4. Switching the table encoding resolved the problem.

After extensive testing, debugging, and fixing issues such as bean scope, connection pool idle timeout, and cache invalidation, the Java microservice was successfully deployed.

Author: Mafengwo Travel Platform R&D Team