Representational State Transfer (REST) is a simple yet powerful software architecture style that is meant for creating scalable web services. This book, RESTful Java web services, is a practical guide for developing RESTful web services using JAX-RS and Jersey extension APIs.
The book starts off with an introduction to RESTful web services and assumes that the reader has no prior knowledge of the RESTful architectural style. Each topic is explained with real-life use cases and code samples. This approach helps the reader in easily translating the theories into solutions for many kinds of real life use cases. In a nutshell, this is a practical guide on using JAX-RS and the Jersey framework extensions to build robust RESTful web services; it is not just about the theory of REST.
Chapter 1, Introducing the REST Architectural Style, covers the REST software architectural style and core architectural elements that form a RESTful system.
Chapter 2, Java APIs for JSON Processing, gives an overview of the JSON message format, and the popular tools and frameworks around JSON.
Chapter 3, Introducing the JAX-RS API, introduces JAX-RS APIs. This chapter will explain how to build RESTful web services with JAX-RS APIs.
Chapter 4, Advanced Features in the JAX-RS API, takes a deeper look into the advanced JAX-RS APIs, along with many real life use cases and code samples.
Chapter 5, Introducing the Jersey Framework Extensions, discusses some of the very useful Jersey framework extension APIs that are not yet a part of the JAX-RS standard.
Chapter 6, Securing RESTful Web Services, explores how to secure RESTful web services using the HTTP basic authentication and OAuth protocols.
Chapter 7, The Description and Discovery of RESTful Web Services, describes popular solutions that are available today for describing, producing, consuming, and visualizing RESTful web services.
Chapter 8, RESTful API Design Guidelines, discusses the best practices and design guidelines that developers will find useful while building RESTful web services. Learning the best practices will help you avoid common pitfalls that others might have faced before.
Appendix, Useful Features and Techniques, covers various useful features and techniques that we had deferred while discussing specific topics in this book. This section explores tools and techniques for building, testing, extending, and packaging JAX-RS web applications.
The examples discussed in this book are built using the following software and tools:
The Java SE Development Kit 8, or newer versions
NetBeans IDE 8.0.2 (with the Java EE bundle), or newer versions
The Glassfish Server 4.1, or newer versions
Maven 3.2.3, or newer versions
The Oracle Database Express Edition 11g Release 2, or newer versions
The HR sample schema that comes with the Oracle database
The Oracle database JDBC driver (ojdbc7.jar or newer versions)
Detailed instructions for setting up all the required tools to run the examples used in this book are discussed in the Appendix, Useful Features and Techniques section of this book.
This book is for Java developers who want to design and develop scalable and robust RESTful web services with the JAX-RS and Jersey APIs. Contents are structured by keeping an eye on real life use cases from the RESTful API world and their solutions. Although the JAX-RS API solves many of the common RESTful web service use cases, some solutions are yet to be standardized as JAX-RS APIs. Keeping this in mind, a chapter is dedicated in this book for discussing Jersey extension APIs, which takes you beyond JAX-RS. This book also discusses the best practices and design guidelines for your REST APIs. In a nutshell, you will find this book useful while dealing with many real life use cases, such as dynamic resource configuration, message broadcasting with the server-sent event, HATEOAS, and so on.
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 are shown as follows: "Assume that we want to delete the Sales department from the data storage."
A block of code is set as follows:
{"departmentId":10,
"departmentName":"IT",
"manager":"John Chen,
"links": [ {
"rel": "employees",
"href": "http://packtpub.com/resources/departments/IT/
employees"
} ]"}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("departments")
@Produces(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
public class DepartmentResource{
//Class implementation goes here...
}Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
mvn install –DskipTests
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Select Local Domain and click on Next to continue the wizard."
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