Spring Data

Chapter 10. REST Repository Exporter

When you are working with the Spring Data repository abstraction (see Chapter 2 for details), the repository interface managing an entity becomes the central point of access for it. Using the Spring Data REST repository exporter project, you can now export (as the name suggests) these managed entities via a REST web service to easily interact with the data. The exporter mechanism will transparently expose a resource per repository, map CRUD operations onto HTTP methods for that resource, and provide a means to execute query methods exposed on the repository interface.

What Is REST?

Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architectural style initially described by Roy Fielding in his dissertation analyzing styles of network-based software architectures [Fielding00]. It is a generalization of the principles behind the HTTP protocol, from which it derives the following core concepts:

Resources

Systems expose resources to other systems: an order, a customer, and so on.

Identifiers

These resources can be addressed through an identifier. In the HTTP world, these identifiers are URIs.

Verbs

Each resource can be accessed and manipulated though a well-defined set of verbs. These verbs have dedicated semantics and have to be used according to those. In HTTP the commonly used verbs are GET, PUT, POST, DELETE, HEAD, and OPTIONS, as well as the rather seldomly used (or even unused) ones, TRACE and CONNECT. Not every resource has to support all of the verbs ...