The goal of Spring's REST support is to make the development of RESTful Web services and applications easier.

Client-side access to RESTful resources is greatly simplified using Spring RestTemplate. RestTemplate follows in the footsteps of other template classes in Spring such as JdbcTemplate and JmsTemplate. Instead of dealing with a verbose lower level API such as Apache Commons HttpClient to create RESTful request, RestTemplate provides one liner methods that are purpose built for RESTful programming.

On the server-side, Spring's REST support is based upon Spring's existing annotation based MVC framework. (For those interested in the rational for that decision, and for not implementing JAX-RS, read Arjen Poutsma's SpringSource TeamBlog entry.) With little effort, you can marshall data out of a RESTful request using @RequestMapping and @PathVariable annotations and return different views as determined by the request's Context-Type header.

In this chapter we describe all the features of Spring's REST support. It is divided into two main two chapters, one for the server-side and one for the client-side. For those new to Spring's MVC framework, you may want to read through the reference documentation on annotation-based controller configuration to understand the general programming model.