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)

Implementing partial update

When a client changes only one part of the resource, you can optimize the entire update process by allowing the client to send only the modified part to the server, thereby saving the bandwidth and server resources. RFC 5789 proposes a solution for this use case via a new HTTP method called PATCH. To learn more about this RFC, visit https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5789. Note that PATCH is not yet officially a part of HTTP/1.1. However, the HTTP protocol allows both the client and the server to implement any new method. Leveraging this flexibility, many vendors have started supporting the HTTP PATCH method.

The PATCH method takes the following form:

PATCH /departments/10 HTTP/1.1 
[Description of changes] 

The [Description of changes] section, in the preceding PATCH method, contains instructions describing how a resource currently residing on the origin...