Developing RESTful web services

In this section, we will provide a few tips to effectively develop Spring-based RESTful web services.

Working with your favorite IDE

Maven and Gradle are well-supported tools and most integrated development environments, or IDEs, provide a way to import such projects. For example, with IntelliJ IDEA, our sample web service project can be imported by selecting the menu options File | Open. Once imported, the project will be shown as follows:

With the project imported, we can start implementing our property management system web service. Before we do so, however, let's discuss how to execute our service.

Note

Both Eclipse and NetBeans also offer support for Maven and Gradle (via plugins).

Making services executable

With Maven or Gradle, it is possible to package the service in a WAR format. However, to quickly start and debug the application during development, we are going to implement an executable Java class. With Spring Boot it is easily achieved via the...