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Showing posts with the label Web Services

spring-data-rest in Action

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What is spring-data-rest? spring-data-rest , a recent addition to the spring-data project, is a framework that helps you expose your entities directly as RESTful webservice endpoints. Unlike rails, grails or roo it does not generate any code achieving this goal. spring data-rest supports JPA, MongoDB, JSR-303 validation, HAL and many more. It is really innovative and lets you setup your RESTful webservice within minutes. In this example i'll give you a short overview of what spring-data-rest is capable of. Initial Configuration  I'm gonna use the new Servlet 3 Java Web Configuration instead of an ancient web.xml. Nothing really special here. public class WebAppInitializer extends AbstractAnnotationConfigDispatcherServletInitializer { @Override protected Class <?>[] getRootConfigClasses () { return new Class <?>[]{ AppConfiguration . class }; } @Override protected Class <?>[] getServletConfigClasses () { return ...

Why REST is so important

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This post is dedicated to REST, an architectural style of shaping webservices and the most misunderstood concept in the history of IT. This post is addressed to you who is designing webservice apis not being fully aware what REST actually means. I'm trying to give you the idea. This post is also addressed to you who think to know what REST means, when in reality you have no clue, just yet. Yes i have met such people in the past - plenty of them. It's not going into the details of the Richardson Maturity Model , and it's not gonna make you a REST expert. There are plenty of guides on the web for that: slides, youtube videos, blogposts, books and more. Rather than going into the details, i'm going to link some good resources at the end of this post. So lets start with The meaning of REST Representational State Transfer. This sentence is not only what REST stands for, it is also the tiniest possible description of what REST actually means. Didn't get it? Read it aga...

Using Browser Web Services with SSO

A while ago I discussed how web services can be invoked using javascript in a browser, but there was a nagging problem that prevented me from deploying it into a production environment - how do I prevent a hacker from manipulating the user identifier in a request? Suppose we have an application that displays an end user's payroll information. In this case we need web service operation will retrieve information specific to the user's ID. We can't just send the user's identifier in the request because that would allow spoofing the ID of another person resulting in a breach of privacy. Retrieving the User's Identity from the Container In a servlet, it is relatively easy to retrieve the user's identity from the request, but this presents a problem if we're using JAX-WS annotated POJOs which have no concept of HTTP or a request object. How the heck do I figure out what the user ID is? I spent many hours looking at WS-Security but I got lost in all the details ab...

Using soapUI with WebSEAL

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In previous posts I explained how it is possible to invoke web services through a browser using javascript, and sometimes the service needs to be debugged using soapUI through WebSEAL. WebSEAL and Cookies My current infrastructure uses WebSEAL as a reverse proxy, which means that a session must be established before any of the back end servers can be accessed, including the server hosting my web service. This poses a problem with soapUI which doesn't provide a mechanism to log into WebSEAL directly, instead I can establish the session using a browser and then copy the cookies into the tool. Log into the application server and authenticate as usual, then copy the cookies using firebug: Then paste the cookies into soapUI: Now all requests will forward the cookie information which WebSEAL should recognize, allowing it to pass through as authenticated.