REST Tag

Every couple of months I'm in a meeting where a couple of developers start arguing about which HTTP status codes to use in their RESTful API, or where they decide to not use HTTP status codes at all and instead layer their own error-code system on top of HTTP.

In my experience, HTTP status codes are more than adequate for communicating from servers to clients. Furthermore, it's preferable to stick with this standard, because that's what most client and server-side HTTP libraries are used to dealing with.

When it comes to which status code to use, the truth is that most of the time it doesn't matter, just so long as it falls within the correct range. In this post I'm going to outline what the important ranges are, and when you should use each one.

If you control both the client and server, these guidelines should do just fine. If you're writing a more generic RESTful service where other people are writing the clients, you may have to be a bit more nuanced. Either way, this rule-of-thumb is a good starting point to work towards the simplest solution possible for your particular problem.

03 June, 2016 /

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It’s an established trend in the modern software world that if you want to get something done, you'll probably need to put together a web service to get do it. People expect data and services to be available everywhere, in a mobile world. With the plethora of frameworks and technologies available to go about implementing a web service, it becomes a chore to try using anything beyond what's already familiar. But every now and then it’s an enjoyable experience to dive into something new and distinctly unfamiliar.

21 April, 2015 /

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Introduction

In recent years, Spring has become much more than just a dependancy injection container and an MVC web application framework. Nowadays, it's the go-to for building enterprise solutions due to the fact it has a fantastic community built up around it, and it has a multitude of projects that makes every developer's life that little bit easier! In this blog post, I'm going to briefly introduce Spring Data REST, and how we used it and an unknown feature called 'projections' on a recent project.
15 April, 2015 /

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