API is an acronym for “Application Programming Interface.” It has a long history since the first computer programs were written. At first, APIs form “contracts” for accessing resources from the operating system, software libraries, or other systems.
Articles
In this tutorial, we will learn how to perform CRUD operations with the help of HTTP requests firing from Postman.
Assumptions
- The CouchDB Server is running at
http://127.0.0.1:5789/ - Database name is
tutorialkart. - The database contains the following two documents (viewed in table view).
I’m not going to explain what reactive programming is or why you should use it. I hope you’ve already read about it somewhere, and if not, you can Google it. In this post, I’m going to tell you how to use reactive programming specifically with Spring Boot and RxJava. Let’s get started.
Prerequisites
Before you continue reading, I expect you understand how to create simple REST API using Spring Boot and RxJava. If you haven’t, you can learn more about Spring Boot on Baeldung and you can learn more about RxJava on AndroidHive. They explain those two materials really well.
In this article, I am going to talk about how to best implement filters over HTTP requests in Spring. That is, assuming we have a program listening in a URI, we can specify that we want to execute something before the requests are processed by the controller.
This is very useful if we want all the requests to meet a requirement, for example, that they must include a specific header.
What Is HATEOAS?
Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State, or HATEOAS for short, is a flavor of REST that uses hypermedia to describe what future actions are available to the client. Allowable actions are derived in the API based on the current application state and returned to the client as a collection of links. The client then uses these links to drive further interactions with the API.
Do I Need HATEOAS to Do REST?
In my opinion, no. Now that’s a potentially controversial point of view, as many will argue that that only hypermedia enabled services are truly RESTful. I base my opinion on experience in the real world and the fact that I’ve built numerous REST APIs over the years that didn’t use HATEOAS but served their purpose well. HATEOAS certainly has its place but it shouldn’t be considered mandatory for RESTful APIs.
