Web services and RESTful APIs are becoming increasingly important in today’s interconnected world. They allow different applications to communicate with each other and exchange data in a standardized way. In this blog post, we will discuss how to create and consume web services and RESTful APIs in Java.

First, let’s discuss what web services are. A web service is a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. It has an interface described in a machine-processable format (specifically WSDL). Other systems interact with the web service in a manner prescribed by its description using SOAP messages, typically conveyed using HTTP with an XML serialization in conjunction with other web-related standards.

To create a web service in Java, you can use popular frameworks such as Apache Axis2 or Apache CXF. These frameworks provide libraries and tools that make it easy to create and deploy web services. Here’s an example of how to create a simple web service using Apache Axis2:

public class HelloWorld {
    public String sayHello(String name) {
        return "Hello, " + name + "!";
    }
}

Once you’ve created the web service, you can deploy it on a web server such as Apache Tomcat. Once deployed, other systems can interact with the web service by sending SOAP messages and receiving responses.

On the other hand, RESTful API is a simple, flexible, and easy-to-use approach to building web services. It is based on the principles of Representational State Transfer (REST), which is an architectural style for building web services. RESTful APIs use the HTTP protocol and standard HTTP methods like GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE to interact with resources.

To create a RESTful API in Java, you can use popular frameworks such as Spring Boot or Jersey. These frameworks provide libraries and tools that make it easy to create and deploy RESTful APIs. Here’s an example of how to create a simple RESTful API using Spring Boot:

@RestController
@RequestMapping("/api")
public class HelloWorldController {
    @GetMapping("/hello/{name}")
    public String sayHello(@PathVariable String name) {
        return "Hello, " + name + "!";
    }
}

Once you’ve created the RESTful API, you can deploy it on a web server such as Apache Tomcat. Once deployed, other systems can interact with the RESTful API by sending HTTP requests and receiving responses.

Consuming web services and RESTful APIs is also relatively easy in Java. You can use libraries such as Apache Axis2 or Jersey to interact with web services, or the built-in java.net.URL and java.net.HttpURLConnection classes to interact with RESTful APIs.

Here’s an example of how to consume a RESTful API using the java.net classes:

import java.io.*;
import java.net.*;

public class RestClient {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
        URL url = new URL("http://localhost:8080/api/hello/world");
        HttpURLConnection conn = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
        conn.setRequestMethod("GET");
        conn.setRequestProperty("Accept", "application/json");

        if (conn.getResponseCode() != 200) {
            throw new RuntimeException("Failed : HTTP error code : " + conn.getResponseCode());
}
    BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader((conn.getInputStream())));
    String output;
    while ((output = br.readLine()) != null) {
        System.out.println(output);
    }
    conn.disconnect();
}
}

This example sends a GET request to the specified URL and sets the “Accept” header to “application/json” to indicate that the client expects a JSON response. The response code and response body are then read and printed to the console.