Spring REST

by Balaji Varanasi

Spring REST is a practical guide for designing and developing RESTful APIs using the Spring Framework. This book walks you through the process of designing and building a REST application while taking a deep dive into design principles and best practices for versioning, security, documentation, error handling, paging, and sorting.

This book provides a brief introduction to REST, HTTP, and web infrastructure. You will learn about several Spring projects such as Spring Boot, Spring MVC, Spring Data JPA, and Spring Security and the role they play in simplifying REST application development. You will learn how to build clients that consume REST services. Finally, you will learn how to use the Spring MVC test framework to unit test and integration test your REST API.

After reading this book, you will come away with all the skills to build sophisticated REST applications using Spring technologies.

What you'll learnHow to build REST applications with Spring technologiesHow to identify REST resources and design their representationsHow to version REST servicesHow to document REST services using SwaggerHow to handle errors and communicate meaningful messagesHow to secure REST services using Basic Auth and OAuth 2.0How to handle large data sets using paginationHow to build REST clients using RestTemplateHow to test REST services using the Spring MVC test frameworkWho this book is forThis book is for enterprise and web developers using Java and Spring and want to build REST applications. The book requires a basic knowledge of Java, Spring and the web, but no prior exposure to REST.

Genres: Technology

210 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 17, 2015

Reviews

[Pablo · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you need to build a RESTful API with Java, this book is the way to go. Short and sweet, it covers most of what you need without too much faff.

I particularly liked the chapter on errors. It has quite a bit of code that I copied into my project as a starting point.

When it came to testing, I liked that it acknowledged the need to do integration testing, that is, testing the API with a real database backend. I personally don't buy the mock everything custom of the Java world as bugs can hide in the integration and these days it's so easy and fast to test against a real database that I don't see any value in mocking it out (if you do, the book covers that too).

It has a small section on writing clients using RestTemplate which I wish it was bigger but I understand my needs in this regard are not that common. Particularly, there was no mention on how to deal with the validation errors scheme introduced earlier when using RestTemplate.

All in all, I like this book. For me, computer books should either be short or comprehensive (not padded) and this one is a good example of a good short to-the-point book.

[Adrian Punga · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not practicing what has been preached

Not saying a word about Spring Data Rest in a book about Spring and Rest is at least dissapointing.

Code examples range from naive to barely usable.

No in depth knowledge shared.

Skip this!

[Andrés Botero · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good introductory book for the implementation of a Rest API with the Spring framework and the Spring Boot project for beginner and medium levels.
It explains the basics to create a rest api with an example incrementing the functionality and adding new features to it.

[Hatem · Rating 5 out of 5]

Light-weight guide for designing and implementing REST API using Spring Boot. Really practical for those who are looking for comprehensive knowledge in small time frame.