Building RESTful web services with Kotlin

Kotlin has been eating up the Java world. It has already become a hit in the Android Ecosystem which was dominated by Java and is welcomed with open arms. Kotlin is not limited to Android development and can be used to develop server-side and client-side web applications as well. Kotlin is 100% compatible with the JVM so you can use any existing frameworks such as Spring Boot, Vert.x, or JSF for writing Java applications.

In this tutorial, we will learn how to implement RESTful web services using Kotlin.

This article is an excerpt from the book 'Kotlin Programming Cookbook', written by, Aanand Shekhar Roy and Rashi Karanpuria.

Setting up dependencies for building RESTful services

In this recipe, we will lay the foundation for developing the RESTful service. We will see how to set up dependencies and run our first SpringBoot web application. SpringBoot provides great support for Kotlin, which makes it easy to work with Kotlin. So let's get started.

We will be using IntelliJ IDEA and Gradle build system. If you don't have that, you can get it from https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/.

How to do it…

Let's follow the given steps to set up the dependencies for building RESTful services:

1. First, we will create a new project in IntelliJ IDE. We will be using the Gradle build system for maintaining dependency, so create a Gradle project:

2. When you have created the project, just add the following lines to your build.gradle file. These lines of code contain spring-boot dependencies that we will need to develop the web app:

buildscript {
    ext.kotlin_version = '1.1.60' // Required for Kotlin integration
    ext.spring_boot_version = '1.5.4.RELEASE'
    repositories {
        jcenter()
    }
    dependencies {
        classpath "org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-gradle-plugin:$kotlin_version" // Required for Kotlin integration
        classpath "org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-allopen:$kotlin_version" // See https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/compiler-plugins.html#kotlin-spring-compiler-plugin
        classpath "org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-gradle-plugin:$spring_boot_version"
    }
}

apply plugin: 'kotlin' // Required for Kotlin integration
apply plugin: "kotlin-spring" // See https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/compiler-plugins.html#kotlin-spring-compiler-plugin
apply plugin: 'org.springframework.boot'

jar {
baseName = 'gs-rest-service'
version = '0.1.0'
}
sourceSets {
main.java.srcDirs += 'src/main/kotlin'
}

repositories {
jcenter()
}

dependencies {
compile "org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-stdlib:$kotlin_version" // Required for Kotlin integration
compile 'org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-web'
testCompile('org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-test')
}

3. Let's now create an App.kt file in the following directory hierarchy:

It is important to keep the App.kt file in a package (we've used the college package). Otherwise, you will get an error that says the following:

** WARNING ** : Your ApplicationContext is unlikely to start due to a `@ComponentScan` of the default package.

The reason for this error is that if you don't include a package declaration, it considers it a "default package," which is discouraged and avoided.

4. Now, let's try to run the App.kt class. We will put the following code to test if it's running:

@SpringBootApplication
open class App {
}
fun main(args: Array<String>) {
SpringApplication.run(App::class.java, *args)
}

5. Now run the project; if everything goes well, you will see output with the following line at the end:

Started AppKt in 5.875 seconds (JVM running for 6.445)

6. We now have our application running on our embedded Tomcat server. If you go to http://localhost:8080, you will see an error as follows:

7. The preceding error is 404 error and the reason for that is we haven't told our application to do anything when a user is on the / path.

Creating a REST controller

In the previous recipe, we learned how to set up dependencies for creating RESTful services. Finally, we launched our backend on the http://localhost:8080 endpoint but got 404 error as our application wasn't configured to handle requests at that path (/). We will start from that point and learn how to create a REST controller. Let's get started!

We will be using IntelliJ IDE for coding purposes. For setting up of the environment, refer to the previous recipe. You can also find the source in the repository at https://gitlab.com/aanandshekharroy/kotlin-webservices.

How to do it…

In this recipe, we will create a REST controller that will fetch us information about students in a college. We will be using an in-memory database using a list to keep things simple:

1. Let's first create a Student class having a name and roll number properties:

package college
class Student() {
lateinit var roll_number: String
lateinit var name: String
constructor(
roll_number: String,
name: String): this() {
this.roll_number = roll_number
this.name = name
}
}

2. Next, we will create the StudentDatabase endpoint, which will act as a database for the application:

@Component
class StudentDatabase {
    private val students = mutableListOf<Student>()
}

Note that we have annotated the StudentDatabase class with @Component, which means its lifecycle will be controlled by Spring (because we want it to act as a database for our application).

3. We also need a @PostConstruct annotation, because it's an in-memory database that is destroyed when the application closes. So we would like to have a filled database whenever the application launches. So we will create an init method, which will add a few items into the "database" at startup time:

@PostConstruct
private fun init() {
    students.add(Student("2013001","Aanand Shekhar Roy"))
    students.add(Student("2013165","Rashi Karanpuria"))
}

4. Now, we will create a few other methods that will help us deal with our database:
   • getStudent: Gets the list of students present in our database:

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fun getStudents()=students

4. • addStudent: This method will add a student to our database:

fun addStudent(student: Student): Boolean {
    students.add(student)
    return true
}

5. Now let's put this database to use. We will be creating a REST controller that will handle the request. We will create a StudentController and annotate it with @RestController. Using @RestController is simple, and it's the preferred method for creating MVC RESTful web services.
6. Once created, we need to provide our database using Spring dependency injection, for which we will need the @Autowired annotation. Here's how our StudentController looks:

@RestController
class StudentController {
    @Autowired
    private lateinit var database: StudentDatabase
}

7. Now we will set our response to the / path. We will show the list of students in our database. For that, we will simply create a method that lists out students. We will need to annotate it with @RequestMapping and provide parameters such as path and request method (GET, POST, and such):

@RequestMapping("", method = arrayOf(RequestMethod.GET))
fun students() = database.getStudents()

8. This is what our controller looks like now. It is a simple REST controller:

package college
import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMethod
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RestController

@RestController
class StudentController {
@Autowired
private lateinit var database: StudentDatabase
@RequestMapping("", method = arrayOf(RequestMethod.GET))
fun students() = database.getStudents()
}

9. Now when you restart the server and go to http://localhost:8080, we will see the response as follows:

As you can see, Spring is intelligent enough to provide the response in the JSON format, which makes it easy to design APIs.

10. Now let's try to create another endpoint that will fetch a student's details from a roll number:

@GetMapping("/student/{roll_number}")
fun studentWithRollNumber( @PathVariable("roll_number")  roll_number:String) =
    database.getStudentWithRollNumber(roll_number)

11. Now, if you try the http://localhost:8080/student/2013001 endpoint, you will see the given output:

{"roll_number":"2013001","name":"Aanand Shekhar Roy"}

12. Next, we will try to add a student to the database. We will be doing it via the POST method:

@RequestMapping("/add", method = arrayOf(RequestMethod.POST))
fun addStudent(@RequestBody student: Student) =
        if (database.addStudent(student)) student
        else throw Exception("Something went wrong")

There's more…

So far, our server has been dependent on IDE. We would definitely want to make it independent of an IDE. Thanks to Gradle, it is very easy to create a runnable JAR just with the following:

./gradlew clean bootRepackage

The preceding command is platform independent and uses the Gradle build system to build the application. Now, you just need to type the mentioned command to run it:

java -jar build/libs/gs-rest-service-0.1.0.jar

You can then see the following output as before:

Started AppKt in 4.858 seconds (JVM running for 5.548)

This means your server is running successfully.

Creating the Application class for Spring Boot

The SpringApplication class is used to bootstrap our application. We've used it in the previous recipes; we will see how to create the Application class for Spring Boot in this recipe.

We will be using IntelliJ IDE for coding purposes. To set up the environment, read previous recipes, especially the Setting up dependencies for building RESTful services recipe.

How to do it…

If you've used Spring Boot before, you must be familiar with using @Configuration, @EnableAutoConfiguration, and @ComponentScan in your main class. These were used so frequently that Spring Boot provides a convenient @SpringBootApplication alternative. The Spring Boot looks for the public static main method, and we will use a top-level function outside the Application class.

If you noted, while setting up the dependencies, we used the kotlin-spring plugin, hence we don't need to make the Application class open.

Here's an example of the Spring Boot application:

package college
import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication

@SpringBootApplication
class Application
fun main(args: Array<String>) {
SpringApplication.run(Application::class.java, *args)
}

The Spring Boot application executes the static run() method, which takes two parameters and starts a autoconfigured Tomcat web server when Spring application is started.

When everything is set, you can start the application by executing the following command:

./gradlew bootRun

If everything goes well, you will see the following output in the console:



This is along with the last message—Started AppKt in xxx seconds. This means that your application is up and running.

In order to run it as an independent server, you need to create a JAR and then you can execute as follows:

./gradlew clean bootRepackage

Now, to run it, you just need to type the following command:

java -jar build/libs/gs-rest-service-0.1.0.jar

We learned how to set up dependencies for building RESTful services, creating a REST controller, and creating the application class for Spring boot. If you are interested in learning more about Kotlin then be sure to check out the 'Kotlin Programming Cookbook'.

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