REST refers to Representational state transfer. It is a software architectural style that defines a set of constraints to create Web services. Those web services that conform to the REST architectural style are RESTful Web services. This provides interoperability between computer systems online and allows requesting systems to access and manage Web application submissions using non-core functions.
On the other hand, Spring is widely used for creating scalable applications and provides Spring MVC for building web applications. SpringMVC is a module of Spring used to develop scalable web applications, but the configuration can be time-consuming and a bit overwhelming for the new developers. To overcome this disadvantage, we have “Spring Boot,” which is built on the top of the Spring and contains all the features of Spring.
However, if you don’t want to use Spring Boot, you can use Spring RestController to create RESTful web services using Spring MVC. Spring RestController annotation is a convenience annotation annotated with @Controller and @ResponseBody. This annotation is applied to a class to mark it as a request handler, and it takes care of mapping request data to the defined request handler method. Once the response body has been created in the holder mode, you convert it to JSON or XML response.
Thus, we see multiple paths you can choose from to create a RESTful web service using Spring. To learn more about this technology and build your application, visit knowledge2life. Enroll for free self-paced courses taught by experts and start learning now!
