Book Image

RESTful Java Web Services - Third Edition

By : Balachandar Bogunuva Mohanram, Jobinesh Purushothaman
Book Image

RESTful Java Web Services - Third Edition

By: Balachandar Bogunuva Mohanram, Jobinesh Purushothaman

Overview of this book

Representational State Transfer (REST) is a simple yet powerful software architecture style to create lightweight and scalable web services. The RESTful web services use HTTP as the transport protocol and can use any message formats, including XML, JSON(widely used), CSV, and many more, which makes it easily inter-operable across different languages and platforms. This successful book is currently in its 3rd edition and has been used by thousands of developers. It serves as an excellent guide for developing RESTful web services in Java. This book attempts to familiarize the reader with the concepts of REST. It is a pragmatic guide for designing and developing web services using Java APIs for real-life use cases following best practices and for learning to secure REST APIs using OAuth and JWT. Finally, you will learn the role of RESTful web services for future technological advances, be it cloud, IoT or social media. By the end of this book, you will be able to efficiently build robust, scalable, and secure RESTful web services using Java APIs.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Securing and authenticating web services

Security on the internet takes many forms. In the context of RESTful web services and this book, we are only interested in two forms of security—securing access to web services and accessing web services on behalf of the allowed users.

What we accomplish with securing web services is the calculated control of resources. Even though most web services are publicly available, we still need to control the data access and traffic throughput. We can do both by restricting the access through subscription accounts. For example, the API access can be limited based on the number of queries a registered user could execute daily. Similarly, many other API vendors restrict the access of their APIs.

Security has two essential elements:

  • Authentication: This involves verifying the identity of the user who is trying to access the application or...