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)

The need for an interface contract

Having a well-documented interface contract enables design-time discovery. The API documentation for RESTful web services provides a standard, language-independent interface, which can be used by both humans and machines to discover the capabilities of APIs without accessing the source code. This chapter introduces a few of the various API documentation tools and options that you might choose from.

Let's start by discussing one of the earliest solutions for RESTful web API documentation—Web Application Description Language (WADL).