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I’m an independent IT consultant and entrepreneur in the Internet and software business. I’m interested in design, enterprise applications, web apps and SaaS products. I design and develop business solutions and applications. I help companies in terms of software quality and knowledge transfer, e.g. with Angular and Spring Boot.

HTTP and REST Standards, Protocols and Headers for More Secure and More Robust Applications

Standards.REST is a website that helps you create better, more robust HTTP- and REST-based applications by providing an overview of existing, proven standards that allow you to build on existing solutions rather than re-invent the wheel yourself. The list of standards mentioned includes OAuth 2.0, the HTTP Caching standard and Application-Level Profile Semantics (ALPS), which - among others - is used extensively in Spring Data REST and Spring HATEOAS. On a closely related note, Stefan Judis published an article on HTTP headers ...

More on JSON and REST API Specifications

Expanding on my previous posts about annotating and validating JSON data structure with JSON Schema defining and documenting REST APIs using Swagger I have two additional suggestions for tools that help you define and build HTTP-based APIs in a less haphazard, more deliberate manner: JSON API: While JSON Schema allows you to annotate and validate JSON-based data types JSON API gives you clear, opinionated guidelines for structuring JSON API responses so you don't have think about those implementation details yourself. Having uniform guidelines for API ...

Sunday October 29th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Swagger: A Roundtrip Tool For Creating And Consuming REST APIs

In this second part of my series on useful tools for developing CRUD applications I'd like to introduce Swagger and Swagger Codegen in particular. Introduce perhaps isn't exactly the right word because first of all Swagger is quite well known in developer circles these days. Secondly, a few months ago I wrote a blog post about how to use Swagger to generate client SDKs for REST APIs. Swagger - originally having originated at Wordnik is a tool for documenting and publishing their ...

Sunday September 10th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Using Swagger to Generate Client SDKs for REST APIs

These days Swagger is a popular, easy-to-use tool for (semi-)automatically documenting REST APIs on-the-fly. For example, in order to document a REST API created with Spring Boot and Jersey literally all you have to do is add these two entries to your Maven pom.xml: [xml] <dependency> <groupid>io.springfox</groupid> <artifactid>springfox-swagger2</artifactid> <version>2.6.1</version> </dependency> <dependency> <groupid>io.springfox</groupid> <artifactid>springfox-swagger-ui</artifactid> <version>2.6.1</version> </dependency> [/xml] You'll then get a ready-made documentation for all your REST API endpoints. An example of how this looks like can be seen here. While this already is very useful in that it helps with properly documenting your software, especially ...

Sunday May 21st, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software

Testing REST Services with REST Assured

RESTful service testing can be unwieldy and difficult to get started with. Providing a REST API implies using a variety of technologies and techniques such as HTTP, JSON, authentication, various payload transfer mechanisms and content types. This is where a tool that abstracts over these technical details and facilitates their application comes in handy. REST Assured is a high-level DSL for testing REST APIs. It draws upon behaviour-driven development (BDD) and hence makes for readable test descriptions. A typical acceptance test with ...

Sunday April 30th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

ng-admin: Create admin panels from REST APIs

ng-admin is a helpful AngularJS UI component that automatically creates an admin user interface for RESTful APIs. Such a component is particularly useful for instance with back end applications in enterprise contexts because it allows you to quickly implement and iterate basic user interfaces based on your current model and its API.

Sunday July 5th, 2015 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann