Spring Data Rest web services for beginners

Spring Data Rest web services for beginners - Step By Step Guide

This tutorial is designed for those who have not worked with the Spring Framework or rest web services before. I am keeping it simple and less verbose so that readers can easily follow the steps and start developing the restful web services using Spring Data Rest.

Spring Framework

is the trending and widely used J2EE frameworks. It has various modules for web development. In this tutorial, we will use the Spring Data Rest.

RESTful Web services

Representational State Transfer (REST) is based on server-client architecture and uses the HTTP protocol(stateless protocol). CRUD operations can be easily mapped on HTTP methods

Create	POST
Read	GET
Update	PUT
Delete	Delete

Prerequisites for this tutorial

Java 8 or later version
Eclipse
Maven

Let's start developing the RESTful web services

STEP 1

Open a new Maven Project in the eclipse, let's call it MyFirstRestApp. We will use the Spring Boot for this tutorial. Open the maven.xml file and add the following dependencies

STEP 2
Create the MyRestApplication.java file
@SpringBootApplication is handling all the configurations behind the screen. It is equivalent to the following three configurations

@EnableAutoConfiguration
@ComponentScan
@Configuration

STEP 3

Now we will move to the Rest web services implementation. For simplicity, I am taking an example of Blog's posts. Create a BlogPostController.java file

@RestController tells the Spring framework that it is a RESTful web services resource.
@RequestMapping("/blogPosts") routes every request to /blogPosts to this class
HTTP methods are routed to the respective operations using the @GetMapping,@PostMapping,@PutMapping and @DeleteMapping annotations.

STEP 4

Run the application as Java application from eclipse

STEP 5

Now, let's test the application. We will use Postman ( a rest client) for this example.