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Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

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Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, you can get started over on the documentation page.

And, you can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

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Since its introduction in Java 8, the Stream API has become a staple of Java development. The basic operations like iterating, filtering, mapping sequences of elements are deceptively simple to use.

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Explore Spring Boot 3 and Spring 6 in-depth through building a full REST API with the framework:

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End-to-end testing is a very useful method to make sure that your application works as intended. This highlights issues in the overall functionality of the software, that the unit and integration test stages may miss.

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1. Overview

This article will explain the basics of Spring Data REST and show how to use it to build a simple REST API.

In general, Spring Data REST is built on top of the Spring Data project and makes it easy to build hypermedia-driven REST web services that connect to Spring Data repositories – all using HAL as the driving hypermedia type.

It takes away a lot of the manual work usually associated with such tasks and makes implementing basic CRUD functionality for web applications quite simple.

2. Maven Dependencies

The following Maven dependencies are required for our simple application:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-data-rest</artifactId></dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-data-jpa</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.h2database</groupId>
    <artifactId>h2</artifactId>
</dependency>

We decided to use Spring Boot for this example, but classic Spring will also work fine. We also chose to use the H2 embedded database in order to avoid any extra setup, but the example can be applied to any database.

3. Writing the Application

We will start by writing a domain object to represent a user of our website:

@Entity
public class WebsiteUser {

    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.AUTO)
    private long id;

    private String name;
    private String email;

    // standard getters and setters
}

Every user has a name and an email, as well as an automatically-generated id. Now we can write a simple repository:

@RepositoryRestResource(collectionResourceRel = "users", path = "users")
public interface UserRepository extends PagingAndSortingRepository<WebsiteUser, Long> {
    List<WebsiteUser> findByName(@Param("name") String name);
}

This is an interface that allows you to perform various operations with WebsiteUser objects. We also defined a custom query that will provide a list of users based on a given name.

The @RepositoryRestResource annotation is optional and is used to customize the REST endpoint. If we decided to omit it, Spring would automatically create an endpoint at “/websiteUsers” instead of “/users“.

Finally, we will write a standard Spring Boot main class to initialize the application:

@SpringBootApplication
public class SpringDataRestApplication {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(SpringDataRestApplication.class, args);
    }
}

That’s it! We now have a fully-functional REST API. Let’s take a look at it in action.

4. Accessing the REST API

If we run the application and go to http://localhost:8080/ in a browser, we will receive the following JSON:

{
  "_links" : {
    "users" : {
      "href" : "http://localhost:8080/users{?page,size,sort}",
      "templated" : true
    },
    "profile" : {
      "href" : "http://localhost:8080/profile"
    }
  }
}

As you can see, there is a “/users” endpoint available, and it already has the “?page“, “?size” and “?sort” options.

There is also a standard “/profile” endpoint, which provides application metadata. It is important to note that the response is structured in a way that follows the constraints of the REST architecture style. Specifically, it provides a uniform interface and self-descriptive messages. This means that each message contains enough information to describe how to process the message.

There are no users in our application yet, so going to http://localhost:8080/users would just show an empty list of users. Let’s use curl to add a user.

$ curl -i -X POST -H "Content-Type:application/json" -d '{  "name" : "Test", \ 
"email" : "[email protected]" }' http://localhost:8080/users
{
  "name" : "test",
  "email" : "[email protected]",
  "_links" : {
    "self" : {
      "href" : "http://localhost:8080/users/1"
    },
    "websiteUser" : {
      "href" : "http://localhost:8080/users/1"
    }
  }
}

Lets take a look at the response headers as well:

HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Location: http://localhost:8080/users/1
Content-Type: application/hal+json;charset=UTF-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

You will notice that the returned content type is “application/hal+json“. HAL is a simple format that gives a consistent and easy way to hyperlink between resources in your API. The header also automatically contains the Location header, which is the address we can use to access the newly created user.

We can now access this user at http://localhost:8080/users/1

{
  "name" : "test",
  "email" : "[email protected]",
  "_links" : {
    "self" : {
      "href" : "http://localhost:8080/users/1"
    },
    "websiteUser" : {
      "href" : "http://localhost:8080/users/1"
    }
  }
}

You can also use curl or any other REST client to issue PUT, PATCH, and DELETE requests. It also is important to note that Spring Data REST automatically follows the principles of HATEOAS. HATEOAS is one of the constraints of the REST architecture style, and it means that hypertext should be used to find your way through the API.

Finally, lets try to access the custom query that we wrote earlier and find all users with the name “test”. This is done by going to http://localhost:8080/users/search/findByName?name=test

{
  "_embedded" : {
    "users" : [ {
      "name" : "test",
      "email" : "[email protected]",
      "_links" : {
        "self" : {
          "href" : "http://localhost:8080/users/1"
        },
        "websiteUser" : {
          "href" : "http://localhost:8080/users/1"
        }
      }
    } ]
  },
  "_links" : {
    "self" : {
      "href" : "http://localhost:8080/users/search/findByName?name=test"
    }
  }
}

5. Conclusion

This tutorial demonstrated the basics of creating a simple REST API with Spring Data REST.

The code backing this article is available on GitHub. Once you're logged in as a Baeldung Pro Member, start learning and coding on the project.
Baeldung Pro – NPI EA (cat = Baeldung)
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Baeldung Pro comes with both absolutely No-Ads as well as finally with Dark Mode, for a clean learning experience:

>> Explore a clean Baeldung

Once the early-adopter seats are all used, the price will go up and stay at $33/year.

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat = Spring Boot)
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Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (cat = Spring)
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (tag = Microservices)
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

eBook – HTTP Client – NPI EA (cat=HTTP Client-Side)
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The Apache HTTP Client is a very robust library, suitable for both simple and advanced use cases when testing HTTP endpoints. Check out our guide covering basic request and response handling, as well as security, cookies, timeouts, and more:

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eBook – Java Concurrency – NPI EA (cat=Java Concurrency)
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Handling concurrency in an application can be a tricky process with many potential pitfalls. A solid grasp of the fundamentals will go a long way to help minimize these issues.

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eBook – Java Streams – NPI EA (cat=Java Streams)
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Since its introduction in Java 8, the Stream API has become a staple of Java development. The basic operations like iterating, filtering, mapping sequences of elements are deceptively simple to use.

But these can also be overused and fall into some common pitfalls.

To get a better understanding on how Streams work and how to combine them with other language features, check out our guide to Java Streams:

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eBook – Persistence – NPI EA (cat=Persistence)
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