Book Image

Modern API Development with Spring and Spring Boot

By : Sourabh Sharma
Book Image

Modern API Development with Spring and Spring Boot

By: Sourabh Sharma

Overview of this book

The philosophy of API development has evolved over the years to serve the modern needs of enterprise architecture, and developers need to know how to adapt to these modern API design principles. Apps are now developed with APIs that enable ease of integration for the cloud environment and distributed systems. With this Spring book, you'll discover various kinds of production-ready API implementation using REST APIs and explore async using the reactive paradigm, gRPC, and GraphQL. You'll learn how to design evolving REST-based APIs supported by HATEOAS and ETAGs and develop reactive, async, non-blocking APIs. After that, you'll see how to secure REST APIs using Spring Security and find out how the APIs that you develop are consumed by the app's UI. The book then takes you through the process of testing, deploying, logging, and monitoring your APIs. You'll also explore API development using gRPC and GraphQL and design modern scalable architecture with microservices. The book helps you gain practical knowledge of modern API implementation using a sample e-commerce app. By the end of this Spring book, you'll be able to develop, test, and deploy highly scalable, maintainable, and developer-friendly APIs to help your customers to transform their business.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Section 1: RESTful Web Services
7
Section 2: Security, UI, Testing, and Deployment
12
Section 3: gRPC, Logging, and Monitoring
16
Section 4: GraphQL

Introducing GraphQL

You might have heard of or be aware of GraphQL, which has become more popular and is the preferred way of implementing APIs for handheld devices and the web.

GraphQL is a declarative query and manipulation language, and a server-side runtime for APIs. GraphQL empowers the client to query exactly the data they want – no more, no less.

We'll discuss its brief history in the next subsection.

Brief history of GraphQL

In 2011, Facebook was facing challenges in terms of improving the performance of its website on mobile browsers. They started building their own mobile app with mobile-native technologies. However, APIs were not up to the mark because of hierarchical and recursive data. They wanted to optimize their network calls. Note that in those days, mobile network speed was in Kb/s in some parts of the world. Having a high quality and fast mobile app was going to be the key to their success since their consumers had started shifting to mobile...