Hi everyone, I hope you're all doing well.
My name is* Harish*, and I’m a second-year ECE* student from India*. I’ve been exploring Apache Fineract’s architecture over the past few days and reviewing the discussion around the proposed Self-Service API (BFF) component for GSoC 2026. I’m very interested in working on this project. >From my understanding, the goal is to build a standalone Backend-for-Frontend service that exposes consumer-facing APIs such as account balances, transaction initiation, and loan applications, while securely integrating with the Fineract backend. I’ve been thinking about approaching this as a *dedicated Spring Boot microservice* that communicates with Fineract via HTTP clients aligned with existing API patterns. For authentication, I’m considering a consumer-focused *JWT/OAuth2-based mechanism*, separate from the admin authentication model. Since this service would be public-facing, I was also considering whether it would be appropriate (even at the POC level) to include: - Asynchronous handling for heavier operations like loan processing - Redis caching for frequently accessed endpoints - Basic rate limiting and validation - Resilience patterns when communicating with Fineract - Docker-based setup for easier deployment and testing I would appreciate guidance from the community on the expected scope of the POC — particularly how production-ready it should be. I also have a few clarifications: 1. Should consumer users be stored within Fineract’s existing user model, or should this BFF maintain a separate identity store linked to Fineract clients? 2. Is multi-tenancy expected to be supported in this POC? 3. Would this component live as a new module within the apache/fineract repository, or as a separate repository? I’d be happy to draft a short architecture proposal based on the feedback here. Looking forward to your thoughts. Thank You and Regards, Harish github: https://github.com/HarishSivakumar-dev mail: [email protected]
