calling rest api from another web application

Question

I have a web application (typical mvc webapp) that needs to call a REST API bundled in a different webapp (war file).

The first web app serves as a front to the separate REST API webapp for customers to register and view their stats, purchase plans etc. But part of the design of this webapp is that it must have example invocations to the other REST API webapp.

There are many rest clients out there, but what would be a reasonable approach to address the above?

I was thinking of using the Spring REST Template to call the REST API but from my mvc controller class in the first webapp. Is this a reasonable approach?

Answer 1

Yes, RestTemplate is a very convenient way for server to server REST calls. Though there are some tricks if you are going to serialize generics.

Answer 2

Once you deploy a webapp using your deployment tool of choice, you can simply call the REST URL. That's one of the great things about REST - it doesn't care about what sort of tool is calling it because it deals in a neutral medium (usually HTTP). Twitter's REST API (here) doesn't care what's calling it - in fact the beauty of it is that anyone can make an app that calls it.

So say you deployed a webapp locally to port 8080, you can just make a REST call to http://localhost:8080/firstapp/rest/foo .

If you're deployed to the World Wide Web, then just call the appropriate domain.