Thursday 8 November 2012

Spring MVC REST Calls From Java

Sometimes, web applications running on servers need to access REST resources located on other servers. From a REST perspective, the physical server act as a logical REST client. This example describes how to proceed. It is based on the Spring MVC REST Calls With Ajax example. The code is available on GitHub in the Spring-Server-Side-REST-Call directory.

Controller

To simulate a remote server, we create a fake remote controller:
@Controller
@RequestMapping(value = "/MyRemoteData")
public class MyRemoteController {

    @RequestMapping(value="/{time}", method = RequestMethod.GET)
    public @ResponseBody MyRemoteData getMyRemoteData(
            @PathVariable long time) {

        return new MyRemoteData(
            "My remote data called at: " + time + " !!!");
    }

}
It return a MyRemoteData object as a JSON:
public class MyRemoteData {

    private String data = "";

    public MyRemoteData() { }

    public MyRemoteData(String message) {
       this.data = message;
    }

    // Setter & Getters

}
We simplify our existing controller to a simple GET. It uses Spring's RestTemplate to make a REST Http GET call to fetch remote data from our 'remote' server:
@Controller
@RequestMapping(value = "/MyData")
public class MyRESTController {

    @RequestMapping(value="/{time}", method = RequestMethod.GET)
    public @ResponseBody MyData getMyData(
            @PathVariable long time) {

        RestTemplate restTemplate = new RestTemplate();

        String remote = "http://localhost:8585/spring-server-side-rest-call/"
            + "MyRemoteData/" + System.currentTimeMillis();

        MyRemoteData mrd = restTemplate.getForObject(
            remote, MyRemoteData.class);

        return new MyData(System.currentTimeMillis(), mrd.getData());

    }

}

Main Page

We simplify our main page and only keep our GET button:
<%@page contentType="text/html" pageEncoding="UTF-8"%>
<%@ taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" %>
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;" charset=UTF-8">
  <script type="text/javascript"
    src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.8.2/jquery.min.js">
  </script>
  <script type="text/javascript"
    src="<c:url value='/resources/js/SpringServerSideRestCall.js'/>">
  </script>
  <title>Welcome To REST With Java !!!</title>
</head>
<body>
  <h1>Welcome To REST With Java !!!</h1>
  <button type="button" onclick="RestGet()">GET</button>
</body>
</html>
Ditto for our javascript:
var prefix = "/spring-server-side-rest-call";

var RestGet = function() {

    $.ajax({
        type: 'GET',
        url:  prefix + "/MyData/" + Date.now(),
        dataType: 'json',
        async: true,
        success: function(result) {
            alert("At " + result.time
                + ": " + result.message);
        },
        error: function(jqXHR, textStatus, errorThrown) {
            alert(jqXHR.status + " " + jqXHR.responseText);
        }
    });

}

Running The Example

Once compiled, the example can be run with mvn tomcat:run. Then, browse:

  http://localhost:8585/spring-server-side-rest-call/

The main page will be displayed:

Spring REST Calls From Java

If you click on get, a pop-up is displayed:


More Spring related posts here.

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