REST (REpresentational State Transfer) is a simple yet powerful software architecture style to create scalable web services and allow them to be simple, lightweight, and fast. The REST API uses HTTP and JSON, so that it can be used with many programming languages such as Ruby, Java, Python, and Scala. Its use in Java seems to be the most popular though, because of the API's reusability.

This book is a guide to developing RESTful web services in Java using the popular RESTful framework APIs available today. You will begin with gaining an in-depth knowledge of the RESTful software architectural style and its relevance in modern applications. Further, you will understand the APIs to parse, generate, transform, and query JSON effectively. Then, you will see how to build a simple RESTful service using the popular JAX-RS 2.0 API along with some real-world examples. This book will introduce you to the Jersey framework API, which is used to simplify your web services.

You will also see how to secure your services with various authentication mechanisms. You will get to grips with various solutions to describe, produce, consume, and visualize RESTful web services. Finally, you will see how to design your web services to equip them for the future technological advances, be it Cloud or mobile computing.

By the end of this book, you will be able to efficiently build robust, scalable, and secure RESTful web services, making use of the JAX-RS and Jersey framework extensions.