CRUD REST services are the backbone of a microservice architecture. If we want to use microservices rather than monolithic applications, it’s essential that we can create a basic service with a minimum of effort. Spring Boot can be used to quickly create and deploy a new web service. Spring Data REST can be used to build out the REST interface based on a database entity model. Using both together allows us to create a running RESTful web service with zero custom Java code and no tricky XML.
This article describes how to build a RESTful web service as an executable JAR that provides CRUD operations against a single MySQL database table.
This demo can be downloaded from GitHub in the Spanners Demo Application version 4.0 (spanners-api module). You can run the working example as a docker-compose stack, along with the associated MySQL database and the Spring MVC web app that consumes the service (see the previous post on docker-compose for details on how to run this).