Chapter 1, A Few Basics, discusses the REST architecture approach and its underlying principles.

Chapter 2, Let's Get Started, enables us to put the scaffolding together, before building a RESTful web service.

Chapter 3, Building RESTful Web Services with Maven and Gradle, looks at the building blocks of creating RESTful endpoints.

Chapter 4, Data Representation, discusses how to manage data representation before we proceed further with building more endpoints. This chapter also offers advice on creating common response formats and error handling.

Chapter 5, CRUD Operations in REST, expands on the previous chapters and takes a look at how you can map CRUD operations to RESTful endpoints.

Chapter 6, Performance, explains that for a web service to be production-ready, it needs to be performant. This chapter discusses performance optimization techniques.

Chapter 7, Dealing with Security, looks at how to ensure a web service is secure by delving into steps that designers need to take. This chapter looks at how to deal with authentication and authorization, as well as input validation techniques.

Chapter 8, Testing Restful Web Services, looks at how to guarantee that a web service delivers the expected functionality, and the testing strategies that designers need to consider. This chapter offers readers the approaches for creating comprehensive test plans.

Chapter 9, Building a REST Client, tells us how for a web service to be of any use, it must be consumed. This penultimate chapter focuses on how to build a client for RESTful web services.

Chapter 10, Scaling a Restful Web Service, explains that scalability is a vast topic and encompasses many aspects. In this last chapter, we discuss what API designers can put in place to help the scaling of their service.

Readers will need the version 8 of the Java Development Kit (JDK) and Apache Maven to build the code samples in this book. In addition, readers who wish to delve into creating their own service, or simply look at the code samples in more detail, should equip themselves with their preferred IDE.

This book is intended for those who want to learn to create RESTful web services with the Spring Framework. It goes beyond the use of Spring and explores approaches to tackling resilience, security, and scalability concerns that will prove useful to any service designer. To make the best use of the code samples included in this book, readers should have basic knowledge of the Java language. Any previous experience with the Spring Framework would also help in getting up and running quickly.

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."

A block of code is set as follows:

import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.*;

@RestController
public class HelloWorldResource {

    @RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.GET)
    public String helloWorld() {
        return "Hello, world!";
    }
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.packtpub.rest-with-spring</groupId>
  <artifactId>rest-with-spring-billing</artifactId>
  <version>1.0.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
  <classifier>classes</classifier>
</dependency>

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

mvn jetty:start

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "For example, with IntelliJ IDEA, our sample web service project can be imported by selecting the menu options File | Open."

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To send us general feedback, simply e-mail <[email protected]>, and mention the book's title in the subject of your message.

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