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)

Returning additional metadata with responses

We discussed a few examples in the previous section for retrieving resources via the HTTP GET request. The resource class implementations that we used in these examples were simply returning plain Java constructs in response to the method call. What if you want to return extra metadata, such as the Cache-Control header or the status code, along with the result (resource representation)?

JAX-RS allows you to return additional metadata via the javax.ws.rs.core.Response class, which wraps the entity and any additional metadata, such as the HTTP headers, HTTP cookie, and status code. You can create a Response instance by using javax.ws.rs.core.Response.ResponseBuilder as a factory. The following example demonstrates the use of the Response class to return the response content along with the additional HTTP header fields:

//Other imports...