How to create a REST API using Java Spring Boot

Last Updated : 01 Jun, 2020

Representational state transfer (REST) is a software architectural style that defines a set of constraints to be used for creating Web services. Web services that conform to the REST architectural style, called RESTful Web services, provide interoperability between computer systems on the Internet. RESTful Web services allow the requesting systems to access and manipulate textual representations of Web resources by using a uniform and predefined set of stateless operations. Other kinds of Web services, such as SOAP Web services, expose their own arbitrary sets of operations.

In this article, we will understand how to create a rest API using spring boot.

Spring is widely used for creating scalable applications. For web applications, Spring provides Spring MVC which is a widely used module of spring which is used to create scalable web applications. But the main disadvantage of spring projects is that configuration is really time-consuming and can be a bit overwhelming for the new developers. The solution to this is Spring Boot. Spring Boot is built on the top of the spring and contains all the features of spring. In this article, we will create a REST API to add employees to the employee list and get the list of employees. In order to do this, we first have to create a simple Spring Boot project in any of the IDE’s and follow the steps:

Initially, we need to define the employee entity. Therefore, the following employee class is defined:

package com.example.demo; 
  
// Creating an entity Employee 
public class Employee { 
  
    public Employee() {} 
  
    // Parameterized Constructor 
    // to assign the values 
    // to the properties of 
    // the entity 
     public Employee( 
        Integer id, String firstName, 
        String lastName, String email) 
    { 
  
        super(); 
  
        this.id = id; 
  
        this.firstName = firstName; 
  
        this.lastName = lastName; 
  
        this.email = email; 
  
            
    } 
  
       private Integer id; 
  
       private String firstName; 
  
       private String lastName; 
  
       private String email; 
  
    // Overriding the toString method 
    // to find all the values 
    @Override
   public String toString() 
    { 
  
        return "Employee [id="
            + id + ", firstName="
            + firstName + ", lastName="
            + lastName + ", email="
            + email + "]"; 
  
            
    } 
  
    // Getters and setters of 
    // the properties 
    public Integer getId() 
    { 
  
         return id; 
    } 
  
    public void setId(Integer id) 
    { 
  
         this.id = id; 
    } 
  
    public String getFirstName() 
    { 
  
         return firstName; 
    } 
  
    public void setFirstName( 
        String firstName) 
    { 
  
         this.firstName = firstName; 
    } 
  
    public String getLastName() 
    { 
  
         return lastName; 
    } 
  
    public void setLastName( 
        String lastName) 
    { 
  
         this.lastName = lastName; 
    } 
  
    public String getEmail() 
    { 
  
         return email; 
    } 
  
    public void setEmail(String email) 
    { 
  
         this.email = email; 
    } 
} 

Now, we need to create a storage class which stores the list of all the employees:

package com.example.demo; 
  
import java.util.ArrayList; 
import java.util.List; 
  
// Class to store the list of 
// all the employees in an 
// Array List 
public class Employees { 
  
    private List<Employee> employeeList; 
  
    // Method to return the list 
    // of employees 
    public List<Employee> getEmployeeList() 
    { 
  
        if (employeeList == null) { 
  
            employeeList 
                = new ArrayList<>(); 
  
                    
        } 
  
        return employeeList; 
  
            
    } 
  
    public void
    setEmployeeList( 
        List<Employee> employeeList) 
    { 
        this.employeeList 
            = employeeList; 
    } 
} 

Till now, we have defined the entity employee and created a storage class. Now, we need to access the employees. So, we create a class from where we will create an object of the storage class to store the employees:

package com.example.demo; 
  
import org.springframework 
    .stereotype 
    .Repository; 
  
// Importing the employees class to 
// use the defined properties 
// in this class 
import com.example.demo.Employees; 
  
@Repository
  
// Class to create a list 
// of employees 
public class EmployeeDAO { 
  
    private static Employees list 
        = new Employees(); 
  
    // This static block is executed 
    // before executing the main 
    // block 
    static
    { 
  
        // Creating a few employees 
        // and adding them to the list 
        list.getEmployeeList().add( 
            new Employee( 
                1, 
                "Prem", 
                "Tiwari", 
                "chapradreams@gmail.com")); 
  
        list.getEmployeeList().add( 
            new Employee( 
                2, "Vikash", 
                "Kumar", 
                "abc@gmail.com")); 
  
        list.getEmployeeList().add( 
            new Employee( 
                3, "Ritesh", 
                "Ojha", 
                "asdjf@gmail.com")); 
  
            
    } 
  
    // Method to return the list 
    public Employees getAllEmployees() 
    { 
  
        return list; 
    } 
  
        
        // Method to add an employee 
        // to the employees list 
        public void
        addEmployee(Employee employee) 
    { 
        list.getEmployeeList() 
            .add(employee); 
            
    } 
} 

Finally, we need to create a controller class which is the actual implementation of the REST API. According to the REST rules, every new entry in the database has to be called by the POST method and all the requests from the database must be called using the GET method. The same methods are implemented in the following code:

package com.example.demo; 
  
import java.net.URI; 
import org.springframework.beans 
    .factory.annotation.Autowired; 
import org.springframework.http 
    .ResponseEntity; 
import org.springframework.web.bind 
    .annotation.GetMapping; 
import org.springframework.web.bind 
    .annotation.PostMapping; 
import org.springframework.web.bind 
    .annotation.RequestBody; 
import org.springframework.web.bind 
    .annotation.RequestMapping; 
import org.springframework.web.bind 
    .annotation.RestController; 
import org.springframework.web.servlet 
    .support.ServletUriComponentsBuilder; 
  
// Import the above-defined classes 
// to use the properties of those 
// classes 
import com.example.demo.Employees; 
import com.example.demo.EmployeeDAO; 
import com.example.demo.Employee; 
  
// Creating the REST controller 
@RestController
@RequestMapping(path = "/employees") 
public class EmployeeController { 
  
    @Autowired
   private EmployeeDAO employeeDao; 
        
        // Implementing a GET method 
        // to get the list of all 
        // the employees 
   @GetMapping( 
        path = "/", 
        produces = "application/json") 
  
    public Employees getEmployees() 
    { 
  
        return employeeDao 
            .getAllEmployees(); 
    } 
  
        
        // Create a POST method 
        // to add an employee 
        // to the list 
   @PostMapping( 
        path = "/", 
        consumes = "application/json", 
        produces = "application/json") 
  
    public ResponseEntity<Object> addEmployee( 
        @RequestBody Employee employee) 
    { 
  
        // Creating an ID of an employee 
        // from the number of employees 
        Integer id 
            = employeeDao 
                  .getAllEmployees() 
                  .getEmployeeList() 
                  .size() 
              + 1; 
  
        employee.setId(id); 
  
        employeeDao 
            .addEmployee(employee); 
  
        URI location 
            = ServletUriComponentsBuilder 
                  .fromCurrentRequest() 
                  .path("/{id}") 
                  .buildAndExpand( 
                      employee.getId()) 
                  .toUri(); 
  
               return ResponseEntity 
            .created(location) 
            .build(); 
    } 
} 

After implementing all the classes in the project, run the project as Spring Boot App. Once the server starts running, we can send the requests through the browser or postman. We can access the running app by going into the following URL:
```
http://localhost:8080/employees/
```