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RESTful Java Web Services, Second Edition

You're reading from   RESTful Java Web Services, Second Edition Design scalable and robust RESTful web services with JAX-RS and Jersey extension APIs

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Product type Paperback
Published in Sep 2015
Publisher
ISBN-13 9781784399092
Length 354 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Languages
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Author (1):
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Jobinesh Purushothaman Jobinesh Purushothaman
Author Profile Icon Jobinesh Purushothaman
Jobinesh Purushothaman
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Table of Contents (11) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Introducing the REST Architectural Style FREE CHAPTER 2. Java APIs for JSON Processing 3. Introducing the JAX-RS API 4. Advanced Features in the JAX-RS API 5. Introducing the Jersey Framework Extensions 6. Securing RESTful Web Services 7. The Description and Discovery of RESTful Web Services 8. RESTful API Design Guidelines A. Useful Features and Techniques Index

Fine-grained and coarse-grained resource APIs


While building a RESTful web API, you should try avoiding the chattiness of APIs. On the other hand, APIs should not be overly coarse-grained as well. Highly coarse-grained APIs become too complex to use because the response representation may contain a lot of information, all of which may not be used by a majority of your API clients.

Let's take an example to understand the difference between fine-grained and coarse-grained approaches for building APIs. Suppose that you are building a very fine-grained API to read the employee details as follows:

  • API to read employee name: GET /employees/10/name

  • API to read employee address1: GET /employees/10/address1

  • API to read employee address2: GET /employees/10/address2

  • API to read employee e-mail: GET /employees/10/email

It is obvious that a majority of your clients may need all the preceding details to work on an employee resource. As a result, clients may end up making four different remote API calls...

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