REST Morning is coming!

Book review: RESTful Web APIs

RESTful Web APIs

By Leonard Richardson, Mike Amundsen, Sam Ruby
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Released: September 2013
Pages: 408

This medium size-book is easy to read, because of it has good structured content, relevant real-life examples and simple terminology. The book doesn't require any specific knowledges, so it can be recommended to newbies as well as to experienced software engineers. 

The book gives a detail overview of HTTP, before actual start dealing about REST services. Then it provides recommendations about handling collections and media over RESTfull API. Microformats and deep dive into the most powerful HTTP feature for REST API - are the parts that I like the most. Haven't heart about HTML metadata profiles, or special kind of rest for embedded systems? So, in this case you can lear a lot of fascinating things. Also, very important is "multilanguage" orientation of the book. It doesn't relies on REST API implementation in some specific framework or even language, instead of that authors describe common principles of writing services.

The book was split in 13 independent chapters. So, a reader can concentrate only on important topics and omit not interesting/actual topics. I believe it is quite positive about book. Personally, I'd prefer more practical examples, and less theory. However, it'd be really difficult to achieve without increasing book size in twice. So, authors decided to focus more on wide theory and you will need more investigation before staring using some of mentioned approaches as the result.  

Small Spring Rest issue

Today I've got 415 Unsupported Media Type on Spring MVC based project for such method @Override @RequestMapping(value = "/findByState/{state}", method = RequestMethod.GET, consumes = "application/json", produces = "application/json") @ResponseBody public List<vacancy> findByState(@PathVariable String state) { log.debug("findByState: {}", state); return manager.findByState(state); }

There was incorrect parameter consumes = "application/json". I'd forgotten to remove it when changed RequestMethod from POST to GET. Perhaps it could be useful for somebody.

REST service and Android client

Some time ago I tried to develop pet application with Guice+Restlet and deploy to GAE. The main idea was to expose several REST services and access to them from android and web clients. I didn't finished it due to lot issue with restlet. So I decided trying MVC REST and spring android-rest-template. It works wonderful. Just few lines and that's it. As usual I run server part on GAE
This is example of my REST service

@Controller public class RestService implements IRestService { final Logger logger = LoggerFactory.getLogger(RestService.class); @Override @RequestMapping("/changeState/{id}/{state}") @ResponseBody // @ResponseStatus(value=HttpStatus.NO_CONTENT) public String changeState(@PathVariable("id") int placeId, @PathVariable("state") String state) { logger.debug("Called service with id{} and state {}", id, state); return "OK"; } }


And here you can see corresponding android client

public void changeState(View view) { String stateValue = view.getTag().toString(); String url = "http://192.168.1.104:8888/Places/changeState/{id}/{stateValue}"; // Create a new RestTemplate instance RestTemplate restTemplate = new RestTemplate(); // Add the String message converter restTemplate.getMessageConverters().add(new StringHttpMessageConverter()); // Make the HTTP GET request, marshaling the response to a String String result = restTemplate.getForObject(url, String.class, 1, "SpringSource"); }


So if you need build REST service and call it from android app, I recommend to use given spring solution