1) What are web services?

To explain web services in layman terms we can take an example of English language. As we know
most of the countries have their own language which other countries can’t understand. So In this case
they make use of English as the common language and this is a widely used language to bridge the
gap between countries.
In the similar way we have web services in the IT world where different languages and platforms can
communicate with one another. E.g. Java applications can communicate with .NET or Angular
applications can communicate with Java applications.
In web services we have two parties, one is the service provider who provides the data/services and
another is the service consumer who gets the required data/services.
There are two types of web services, SOAP & RESTful web services. The communication between
both parties is via http protocol. In SOAP the data exchange format is XML and in RESTful it uses
multiple data formats E.g. JSON, Text etc.

2) What is REST?

REST stands for representational state transfer. HTTP is there for quite some time now and almost all
the websites use it. Roy Fielding did research on how HTTP can be used for other types of
applications and that’s where RESTful services was born.
HTTP has various methods such as GET, POST, PUT, DELETE which we can use to perform an
operation against a URL/URI. You can relate it to the CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete)
operations you perform against the database which are very common in all the applications and across
the industry.
The data exchange between service provider and service consumer can be in JSON, XML or any other
format which makes RESTful services Interoperable.

3) What do you mean by REST is stateless

This is one of the biggest advantages of REST in that it is stateless. Statelessness does not mean that it
does not have state at all, but it exchanges the representational state between applications. The state is
maintained at the client side instead of maintaining it at the server side.

4) What are the different HTTP methods present in REST

Some of the commonly used HTTP methods are as below.

GET: This is used to fetch/get data from the server.

POST: This is used to create a new resource.
PUT: This is used to modify a resource
DELETE: This is used to delete a resource

5) What is a resource in REST

Everything that we access is called a resource. Each resource has something called as identifier which
is called as URI (uniform resource identifier)
E.g. Below a
/employees/1 – URI for accessing an employee resource with id 1.
/employees – URI for accessing all the employees

and the action that we perform on resource is using the HTTP methods i.e. GET, POST, PUT,
DELETE. We will see the meaning of each HTTP method in the questions below.
6) What is the difference between POST and PUT

POST is used to create a new resource and PUT is used to update an existing resource.

7) What do you mean by a resource in REST

In Object oriented programming we have objects, similarly we have resources in REST. Operations
are performed against a resource. Resources can be in XML or JSON representation.
8) Mention some of the implementations of REST

Some of the common implementations used to implement REST web services are Apache CXF,
Jersey, REST Easy & Spring REST. Spring REST is used most widely today.
9) What are the tools used to test the REST web services

There are 2 parts to REST web services, one is service consumer and another is service provider.
Let’s say you are a service provider and your service is invoked by multiple consumers. Before
releasing/deploying your final code you have to test it properly using some standalone tools. Two of
the very common tools are Postman & SOAP UI.
10) What does a REST request consist of

REST request consists of request headers and request body. Mandatories of both depends on your
business logic.

11) Name some of the HTTP response codes

200 – OK
Operation successful
400 – BAD REQUEST
For missing Mandatory headers or any other parameter
404 – NOT FOUND
If a particular URI is not present or wrong.
405 – METHOD NOT ALLOWED
If URI has a different http method and if the invoking http method is different. E.g. if /getEmployee
has a GET http method and if you are invoking the endpoint with POST http method.
401 – UNAUTHORIZED
If the user is not authenticated properly then we return 401
403 – FORBIDDEN
If the user is authenticated but he does not have rights to access the resource.

12) What are the spring annotations used for HTTP methods.

@GetMapping – To fetch a resource

@PostMapping – To create a new resource
@PutMapping – To update an existing resource
@DeleteMapping – To delete a resource
13) What is @RestController?

@RestController = @Controller + @ResponseBody

This annotation is the combination of 2 annotations. By adding this we don’t need to explicitly add
@ResponseBody annotation. The class annotated with @RestController has REST endpoint methods
exposed so that other services can consume.

14) What is RestTemplate and why do we use it?

If you want to consume a RESTful service, then you can make use of RestTemplate. We use the
exchange () method to invoke the service.

First parameter to the exchange method is the URI, second parameter is the HTTP method i.e. GET,
POST, PUT or DELETE, third parameter is the entity which consists of headers & body or just
header/body and fourth parameter containing the return type of the response that the service will
return.
15) What is ResponseEntity?

Being a RESTful service provider if we want to return a response body that contains Data as well as
the response code then we make use of ResponseEntity

E.g. let’s say we have a URI or a method getEmployee which returns an Employee object. Along with
the Employee object we want to return a response code say 200, then we would return as

16) @RequestHeader OR @RequestHeaders annotation

Both the annotations are used to receive values from the request headers.

-> @RequestHeader annotation is used to get each header one by one whatever is required.

@RequestHeaders are used to get all the headers into one object. This can be used when there are
too many headers and you want all instead of fetching it one by one.
17) What do you mean by Accept and Content-Type header

Both are keys that are present in the headers sent from the client (E.g. browsers) to the service
Accept: It contains the value which specifies what response format the client is expecting. E.g.
application/json
Content-Type: It contains the value which specifies which format of the data sent to the service.
18) Produces and consumes in REST

Produces specifies the MIME media type that is sent to the client and Consumes specifies the MIME
media type that is accepted or consumed from the client.
E.g. The consumer of the below service has to send the request in the JSON format.

19) What are the best practises in developing RESTful services?

As we know, there are two parties involved in REST communication. Service consumer and Service
provider. Service provider is the one who has exposed the web service and consumers are the one who
are accessing the web service.

While developing we need to make the best use of HTTP methods, make semantic use of methods
properly.E.g. If you are providing data to the consumer then use HTTP GET, if you are creating a new
resource then make use of HTTP POST.

Also make the best use of HTTP Response codes. E.g. If the operation is successful send a 200
response. If the request format is not proper or some of the header is missing we need to send a 400
response. I did see some developers sending 500 Internal Server which is wrong. We need to send the
correct response codes

Avoid sending sensitive data in the URIs and headers.

While designing the URIs, make use of plural forms. For example
/emloyees/123 – CORRECT
/employee/123 – WRONG
20) What are HttpMessageConverters in Spring REST and why does it return JSON format by
default?

HttpMessageConverters are used to convert the object to JSON/XML and vice versa. While
developing REST service in Spring Boot, the default data format that is being returned in JSON. This
is because it registers the default MessageConvertor i.e. Jackson.
21) How to add XML support for our endpoint?

As we know that JSON is the default data format that REST service returns, the question is how we
send the response in XML format if the client requests it. If we are using spring boot then we need to
add below dependency.

22) What is Swagger in the REST web services world?

As per the Open API/Swagger specification “The OpenAPI Specification (OAS) defines a standard,
language-agnostic interface to RESTful APIs which allows both humans and computers to discover
and understand the capabilities of the service without access to source code, documentation, or
through network traffic inspection”

Swagger is a document or contract which is either .yml or .json format which has below details
-The list of endpoints present in our service and their respective HTTP method.
-Header that we need to pass to the consumer.
-The data definition i.e. request body that a service consumer needs to send, and in return what the
endpoint/service provider will return.
-Http Response code being returned for different scenarios.

Usually the service provider will prepare the document and share it with one or more service
consumers, so that both parties work independently based on the agreed contract. Sometimes service
providers & service consumers will discuss together to design the final contract/swagger file.