How To Develop REST CRUD API Using Spring Boot ?
It will not be an overstatement if I say that we can’t develop an enterprise application without using webservices as an integration layer. We generally develop webservices in the form of either a producer or a consumer or both. However Producer is very important for us because we develop it in Java only. Also we have full control on database interaction logic implementation with us. Now you might have interpreted the significance of our article ‘How to develop REST CRUD API using Spring Boot ?’. On the other hand, Consumer can be Angular Application, ReactJS Application, Android Device, iOS Device and many others or even our favorite java based RestTemplate(Spring Boot REST Client). Our focus in this article is on developing producer API(REST API) using Spring Boot. Now let’s discuss on ‘How to develop REST CRUD API using Spring Boot ?’ without leaving any theoretical concept which are very essential to know.
How To Reduce Boilerplate Code In REST API ? : Spring Data REST
In previous article on REST API Development, we have already seen that how we can develop a REST API with minimum lines of code. Still, we have more scope to reduce lines of code using a concept called ‘Spring Data REST’ in Spring Boot. So, our title of the article is ‘How to reduce boilerplate code in REST API: Spring Data REST’. In Spring Data REST concept we don’t have to write even RestController and its methods. The Spring Data REST dependency will take care of it using HATEOAS (Hypertext as the Engine of Application State).
HATEOAS project is a library of APIs that we can use to easily create REST representations. Spring Data REST provides hyperlinks to access REST operations with the help of HATEOAS only. When some details of a resource are requested, you will provide the resource details as well as details of related resources and the possible actions you can perform on the resource. HATEOAS provides us this type of details. You might have guessed that we will learn Spring Data REST concepts using Spring Boot only. Let’s start learning ‘How to reduce boilerplate code in REST API : Spring Data REST’.
How To Write REST Consumer API Using Spring Boot? : RestTemplate
Apart from three well known layers i.e. Presentation Layer, Service Layer and Data Layer, we may also have an Integration Layer. This layer generally works with web services concept and connects two different applications to exchange data between them. One application refers to producer/provider, whereas other refers to consumers. However, we have already gone through the REST Producer API in another article where we had developed different operations to produce REST API. Now, we must have a question in mind ‘How to write REST Consumer API using Spring Boot : RestTemplate’. We had also discussed a bit about RestTemplate( The Spring REST Client). In fact, RestTemplate provides us Consumer methods to consume services provided by producer applications. We can even have various non-java Consumer applications. However, our RestTemplate is written in Java only. Accordingly, let’s start working on ‘How to write a REST Consumer API using Spring Boot: RestTemplate’.