Building REST services with Spring Boot, JPA and MySql: Part 2

Introduction

In the first part of this tutorial we saw how to build a skeleton java app from scratch based on the Spring framework and implemented the persistence to MySql database.


In this second part, we will implement a REST web service with the Spring framework.


I'll be using maven 3, version 3.0.5 and Java 8 SDK. Google around for installation of these in your environment.

Step 2: Implement a REST endpoint with Spring

In order to use the Spring framework as the basis for our REST endpoint, we need to add the necessary dependencies to our existing pom.xml:



We already have a model persisted to MySql and now we will add a controller with a method index that retrieves all persisted instances of our model.

We will annotate this method so that it is published as a REST endpoint when running our app within a Servlet container.



The Spring annotations added to our code are:

• @RestController This declares our class as a controller returning domain objects instead of views. Spring will take care of the JSON serialization automatically via Jackson serializer
  
  
•  @RequestMapping(value="/games", method = RequestMethod.GET) This maps GET requests for the path /games to our controller method.

We can now add a test for our new REST endpoint.



In our test, instead of running our controller within an external application Server, we use the Spring class MockMvc, which will direct requests to our controller, making our test faster.

If we now run mvn clean test:

Running our REST endpoint

We are now ready to package our app and run it.

If we run mvn clean package:



We now have a jar and we can just run it. Yes!!! That's right: we can just run it directly!
Spring has generated an uber jar: a jar with all needed dependencies to run our app, including an embedded servlet container: by default Tomcat, but you can  easily change it for Jetty or any other of your preference.

If we launch the command
 
java -jar target/spring-boot-mysql-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar


We can see on the console a Tomcat has started and is listening on 8080 for requests!

Source Code

Source code on GitHub