Chapter 1, REST – Where It Begins, starts with the basic concepts of REST, how to design RESTful services, and best practices around designing REST resources. It covers the JAX-RS 2.0 API to build RESTful services in Java.

Chapter 2, Resource Design, discusses different request response patterns; it covers topics such as content negotiation, resource versioning, and response codes in REST.

Chapter 3, Security and Traceability, covers advanced details in security and traceability around the REST API. It includes topics such as access control, authentication using OAuth, exception handling, and auditing and validation patterns.

Chapter 4, Designing for Performance, covers the design principles needed for performance. It discusses the caching principles, asynchronous and long running jobs in REST, and how to use the partial updates using PATCH.

Chapter 5, Advanced Design Principles, covers advanced topics such as rate limiting, response pagination, and internationalization and localization principles with detailed samples. It covers extensibility, HATEOAS, and topics such as testing and documenting REST services.

Chapter 6, Emerging Standards and the Future of REST, covers real-time APIs using WebHooks, WebSockets, PuSH, and Server-sent event services, and compares and contrasts them in various areas. Additionally, this chapter covers case studies demonstrating how the emerging technologies such as WebSockets and WebHooks are being used in real-time applications. It also outlines the role of REST with micro services.

Appendix, covers different REST API from GitHub, Twitter, and Facebook, and how they tie into the principles discussed in Chapters 2, Resource Design, through Chapter 5, Advanced Design Principles.

To be able to build and run samples provided with this book, you will need the following:

This book is a perfect reading source for application developers to get familiar with REST. It dives deep into the details, best practices, and commonly used REST patterns as well as gives insights on how Facebook, Twitter, PayPal, GitHub, Stripe, and other companies are implementing solutions with RESTful services.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "GET and HEAD are safe methods."

A block of code is set as follows:

    @GET
    @Path("orders")
    public List<Coffee> getOrders() {
        return coffeeService.getOrders();    }

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

@Path("v1/coffees")
public class CoffeesResource {
    @GET
    @Path("orders")
    @Produces(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
    public List<Coffee> getCoffeeList( ){
      //Implementation goes here

    }

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

#  curl -X GET http://api.test.com/baristashop/v1.1/coffees

New terms and important words are shown in bold.

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