Some say that all good things must come to an end. While this exploration of the DELETE method marks the end of this article series, you’ll see that deletion is not necessarily the end of life for the data items backing your REST API.

When the time comes to handle data updates via a REST API, we may have a choice to make. The list of HTTP verbs, which are the basis for REST operations, includes both PUT and PATCH. Each of these provide a way to update existing resources, and we will cover both in this article.

Wiring up a controller method to support POST requests isn’t all that different from setting up a GET handler. However, taking data in to our API raises new considerations. How do we make sure the input meets our quality standards? How do we handle the fields required in our data layer that are not provided by the input object?

In the previous article in this series, we created some GET methods on our @RestController and we tested these methods by calling them in Postman and reviewing the results. We must be done, right?

We will start with the humble GET request, but before we can expose our data to the world we need somewhere to write that code. We need a @RestController. The controller is fundamental to Spring MVC, both in web applications and a REST API like we’re building here. This is where we define our specific HTTP endpoints and the corresponding methods to handle requests.

API development with a REST approach is a widely used standard for providing application functionality over a network. Spring Boot provides robust capabilities for implementing your API, and this blog series will provide a solid introduction to developing and testing a REST API with Spring Boot.