In the previous chapter, we built a service that reads tweets from Twitter, counts the hashtag votes, and stores the results in a MongoDB database. We also used the MongoDB shell to add polls and see the poll results. This approach is fine if we are the only ones using our solution, but it would be madness if we released our project and expected users to connect directly to our MongoDB instance in order to use the service we built.

Therefore, in this chapter, we are going to build a RESTful data service through which the data and functionality will be exposed. We will also put together a simple website that consumes the new API. Users may then either use our website to create and monitor polls or build their own application on top of the web services we release.