ZCW-SpringZero

Getting Started Building a RESTful Web Service

Introduction

This Getting Started guide will walk you through the process of creating a simple REST service using Spring.

To help you get started, we've provided an initial project structure as well as the completed project for you in GitHub:

$ git clone https://github.com/springframework-meta/gs-rest-service.git

In the start folder, you'll find a bare project, ready for you to copy-n-paste code snippets from this document. In the complete folder, you'll find the complete project code.

Before we can write the REST service itself, there's some initial project setup that's required. Or, you can skip straight to the fun part.

Adding dependencies

First you'll need to set up a basic build script. You can use any build system you like, but we've included snippets for Maven and Gradle here. If you're not familiar with either of these, you can refer to our Getting Started with Maven or Getting Started with Gradle guides.

Add the Spring MVC and Jackson JSON libraries as dependencies:

Maven

Create a pom.xml file with the following contents:

pom.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>

    <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
    <artifactId>gs-rest-service-complete</artifactId>
    <version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>

    <parent>
        <groupId>org.springframework.bootstrap</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-bootstrap-starters</artifactId>
        <version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
    </parent>

    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework.bootstrap</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-bootstrap-web-starter</artifactId>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.core</groupId>
            <artifactId>jackson-databind</artifactId>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>

</project>

Experienced Maven users who feel nervous about using an external parent project: don't panic, you can take it out later, it's just there to reduce the amount of code you have to write to get started.

Gradle [copy complete build.gradle to clipboard]

Add the following within the dependencies { } section of your build.gradle file:

build.gradle

compile "org.springframework.bootstrap:spring-bootstrap-web-starter:0.0.1-SNAPSHOT"
compile "com.fasterxml.jackson.core:jackson-databind:2.2.0-"

Creating a Configuration Class

The first step is to set up a simple Spring configuration class. It'll look like this:

src/main/java/hello/HelloWorldConfiguration.java

package hello;

import org.springframework.context.annotation.ComponentScan;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.config.annotation.EnableWebMvc;

@Configuration
@EnableWebMvc
@ComponentScan
public class HelloWorldConfiguration {
}

This class is concise, but there's plenty going on under the hood. @EnableWebMvc handles the registration of a number of components that enable Spring's support for annotation-based controllers—you'll build one of those in an upcoming step. And we've also annotated the configuration class with @ComponentScan which tells Spring to scan the hello package for those controllers (along with any other annotated component classes).

Creating a Representation Class

With the essential Spring MVC configuration out of the way, it's time to get to the nuts and bolts of our REST service by creating a resource representation class and an endpoint controller.

Before we get too carried away with building the endpoint controller, we need to give some thought to what our API will look like.

What we want is to handle GET requests for /hello-world, optionally with a name query parameter. In response to such a request, we'd like to send back JSON, representing a greeting, that looks something like this:

{
    "id": 1,
    "content": "Hello, stranger!"
}

The id field is a unique identifier for the greeting, and content is the textual representation of the greeting.

To model the greeting representation, we’ll create a representation class:

src/main/java/hello/Greeting.java

package hello;

public class Greeting {

    private final long id;
    private final String content;

    public Greeting(long id, String content) {
    this.id = id;
    this.content = content;
    }

    public long getId() {
    return id;
    }

    public String getContent() {
    return content;
    }

}

Now that we've got our representation class, let's create the endpoint controller that will serve it.

Creating a Resource Controller

In Spring, REST endpoints are just Spring MVC controllers. The following Spring MVC controller handles a GET request for /hello-world and returns our Greeting resource:

src/main/java/hello/HelloWorldController.java

package hello;
import java.util.concurrent.atomic.AtomicLong;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Controller;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMethod;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestParam;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.ResponseBody;

@Controller
@RequestMapping("/hello-world")
public class HelloWorldController {
    
    private static final String template = "Hello, %s!";
    private final AtomicLong counter = new AtomicLong();

    @RequestMapping(method=RequestMethod.GET)
    public @ResponseBody Greeting sayHello(@RequestParam(value="name", required=false, defaultValue="Stranger") String name) {
        return new Greeting(counter.incrementAndGet(), String.format(template, name));
    }
    
}

The key difference between a human-facing controller and a REST endpoint controller is in how the response is created. Rather than rely on a view (such as JSP) to render model data in HTML, an endpoint controller simply returns the data to be written directly to the body of the response.

The magic is in the @ResponseBody annotation. @ResponseBody tells Spring MVC to not render a model into a view, but rather to write the returned object into the response body. It does this by using one of Spring's message converters. Because Jackson 2 is in the classpath, this means that MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter will handle the conversion of Greeting to JSON if the request's Accept header specifies that JSON should be returned.

Creating an executable main class

We can launch the application from a custom main class, or we can do that directly from one of the configuration classes. The easiest way is to use the SpringApplication helper class:

src/main/java/hello/HelloWorldConfiguration.java

package hello;

import org.springframework.bootstrap.SpringApplication;
import org.springframework.bootstrap.context.annotation.EnableAutoConfiguration;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.ComponentScan;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.config.annotation.EnableWebMvc;

@Configuration
@EnableAutoConfiguration
@EnableWebMvc
@ComponentScan
public class HelloWorldConfiguration {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(HelloWorldConfiguration.class, args);
    }
}

The @EnableAutoConfiguration annotation has also been added: it provides a load of defaults (like the embedded servlet container) depending on the contents of your classpath, and other things.

Running the Service

Add the following to your pom.xml:

pom.xml

<properties>
    <start-class>hello.HelloWorldConfiguration</start-class>
</properties>

You can now run the application with the Maven exec plugin:

$ mvn exec:java

... service comes up ...

so in another terminal you can do this

$ curl localhost:8080/hello-world
{"id":1,"content":"Hello, Stranger!"}

Building an executable JAR

Add the following to your pom.xml file (keeping any existing properties or plugins intact):

pom.xml

<build>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
            <artifactId>maven-shade-plugin</artifactId>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>

The following will produce a single executable JAR file containing all necessary dependency classes:

$ mvn package

Now you can run it from the jar as well, and distribute that as an executable artifact:

$ java -jar target/gs-rest-service-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar

... service comes up ...

Congratulations! You have just developed a simple REST service using Spring. This is a basic foundation for building a complete REST API in Spring.

Related Resources

There's more to building REST services than is covered here. You may want to continue your exploration of Spring and REST with the following Getting Started guides:

• Handling POST, PUT, and GET requests in REST services
• Creating self-describing APIs with HATEOAS
• Securing a REST service with HTTP Basic
• Securing a REST service with OAuth
• Consuming REST services
• Testing REST services