Stream Log

Overview

This project is a web application for keeping track of movies and series.

Users can browse available titles, view details, rate movies, and keep track of their watch progress. The idea was to build something similar to a personal watch tracker rather than another streaming service.

The project was developed as part of a university Service-Oriented Architecture project in a team of three. We focused on splitting the application into smaller services instead of building everything as one application.

Services communicate synchronously through REST APIs for user-facing requests, while ActiveMQ is used for asynchronous communication and background tasks such as updating rating statistics.

Main features

Users can:

• Browse and search movies
• View movie details
• Create an account and log in
• Rate movies
• Track their watch progress
• View their personal statistics
• See average ratings and total rating counts

Technical approach

The application is split into several services, with each service responsible for a specific part of the system.

Service	Responsibility
User Profile	Registration, login, and user profiles
Catalog	Movie browsing and basic movie information
Metadata	Detailed movie information
Progress	Watch status and progress
Rating	User ratings
Analytics	Rating statistics
Client	Web interface
API Gateway	Routing and authentication

The services communicate mainly through REST APIs. The Catalog Service also combines information from several other services when loading a movie’s detail page.

For rating updates, ActiveMQ is used to send events to the Analytics Service so rating statistics can be updated in the background.

Each service that stores data has its own PostgreSQL database, keeping the services separated and independent.

Architecture

The application follows a Service-Oriented / Microservices architecture.

The web client communicates with the system through an Nginx API Gateway, which handles routing and authentication before forwarding requests to the appropriate service.

Docker Compose is used to run the application and its services together, making the project easier to set up and test.

Demo

Future improvements

I feel like there’s still a lot of potential in this MVP. There are quite a few things that can be improved, especially the UI, as this project focused more on the architecture and microservice implementation than the visual side of the application.

Features like proper TV show and episode tracking, integrating an external movie API, and adding more personalized statistics and recommendations based on user activity would be great additions.

Lessons learned

This project gave me a much better understanding of how multiple services can work together as one. I also learned that splitting an application into services gives you more flexibility, but it also introduces extra complexity around communication, authentication, databases, and deployment.

Working with Spring Boot, Docker, REST APIs, ActiveMQ, and PostgreSQL also gave me practical experience with technologies commonly used in real-world software systems.