The Complete Practical Guide to Designing, Building, Securing, and Shipping Production APIs with Java

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Your first Spring Boot endpoint takes five minutes. Your first production API takes much longer.

Returning JSON from a controller is easy. The hard part comes next: designing resources that stay stable as clients multiply, validating input and returning consistent errors, persisting data without surprise queries, securing every endpoint with JWT and OAuth2, evolving the API without breaking anyone, calling other services without cascading failures, testing it all against a real database, and running it in production where you can see what it is doing.

This book shows you how experienced teams do all of it — step by step, with one realistic running example: PortLoop, a parcel delivery and freight platform with merchants, couriers, public tracking, and partner-carrier webhooks.

• 529 pages · 28 chapters + 4 appendices
• HTTP and REST fundamentals, Spring core, configuration, and profiles
• Controllers, Jackson and Java records, Bean Validation, and ProblemDetail errors (RFC 9457)
• Pagination, filtering, sorting, versioning, idempotency keys, and ETags
• Spring Data JPA, the N+1 problem, transactions, optimistic locking, Flyway, JdbcClient, and caching
• Spring Security, JWT, OAuth2 resource servers, and ownership-based authorization
• RestClient, HTTP interface clients, timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, and rate limiting
• Events, messaging, webhooks, and the transactional outbox
• Testing with slices and Testcontainers, virtual threads, and performance
• Actuator, Micrometer, tracing, Docker images, Kubernetes, and a full production case study
• Written for Spring Boot 3 on Java 21, with notes on Spring Boot 4

Table Of Contents

Part I — Foundations

• Ch 1 · Why Spring Boot for REST Services: The Big Picture
• Ch 2 · Setting Up: JDK, Maven and Gradle, Spring Initializr, and Project Structure
• Ch 3 · HTTP and REST Fundamentals for Spring Developers
• Ch 4 · Spring Core Essentials: Beans, Dependency Injection, Configuration, and Profiles
• Ch 5 · Your First REST Service: The PortLoop Shipments API End to End

Part II — Building the API

• Ch 6 · Controllers in Depth: Mappings, Path Variables, Query Parameters, and Headers
• Ch 7 · Request and Response Bodies: Jackson, DTOs, and Java Records
• Ch 8 · Validation with Jakarta Bean Validation
• Ch 9 · Error Handling: @RestControllerAdvice, ProblemDetail, and RFC 9457
• Ch 10 · Resource Design: URIs, Pagination, Filtering, Sorting, and Hypermedia

Part III — Data and Persistence

• Ch 11 · Spring Data JPA Fundamentals: Entities, Repositories, and Queries
• Ch 12 · Relationships, Fetching Strategies, and the N+1 Problem
• Ch 13 · Transactions, Concurrency, and Optimistic Locking
• Ch 14 · Schema Migrations with Flyway and Working Well with PostgreSQL
• Ch 15 · Beyond JPA: JdbcClient, Projections, and Caching

Part IV — Security and API Evolution

• Ch 16 · Spring Security Fundamentals for REST APIs
• Ch 17 · JWT and OAuth2 Resource Servers
• Ch 18 · Authorization: Roles, Scopes, Ownership, and Method Security
• Ch 19 · API Versioning, Idempotency, ETags, and Backward Compatibility
• Ch 20 · Documenting APIs with OpenAPI and springdoc-openapi

Part V — Integration, Testing, and Performance

• Ch 21 · Calling Other Services: RestClient, WebClient, and HTTP Interface Clients
• Ch 22 · Resilience: Timeouts, Retries, Circuit Breakers, and Rate Limiting
• Ch 23 · Asynchronous Work, Application Events, Messaging, and Webhooks
• Ch 24 · Testing REST Services: Unit, Slice, and Integration Tests with Testcontainers
• Ch 25 · Performance and Scalability: Virtual Threads, Connection Pools, and Profiling

Part VI — Production and Case Study

• Ch 26 · Observability: Actuator, Micrometer, Structured Logging, and Tracing
• Ch 27 · Packaging and Deployment: Docker Images, Kubernetes, and Externalized Configuration
• Ch 28 · Case Study: Taking the PortLoop Platform to Production

Appendices

• App A · Spring Boot REST Cheat Sheet
• App B · Templates and Annotation Reference
• App C · Production Checklist
• App D · Glossary

WHO IT IS FOR
Java developers who want to build professional REST services, backend engineers moving to Spring from another stack, Spring developers who want solid answers on errors, security, versioning, testing, and operations, and tech leads who set API conventions for their teams.

FORMAT
PDF (A4), 529 pages, English, clickable table of contents and PDF bookmarks. 1st Edition, 2026. Published by thenexbooks.

This book is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Broadcom, VMware, the Spring team, or Oracle. Spring and Spring Boot are trademarks of Broadcom Inc. and/or its subsidiaries; Java is a trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

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