As you know Spring Boot takes a very opinionated approach to configuration of

your web applications.

If you don't override the configuration what will get set up automatically is

probably exactly what you wanted or at least that's the claim of the framework.

I find the convention over configuration approach is exactly what I want.

Almost all of the time I've always been thoroughly impressed with what you get out

of the box from a Spring Boot project.

And as you saw in spring data similar auto magic things happen.

You simply define an interface and make it match a naming structure and

blammo you have a working method that queries or

entities whatever back in database you might choose.

It's super powerful, extremely intuitive and such an amazing time saver.

Well there is a project that works in a similar start simple

add complexity of events.

Spring data rest is quite literally the combination of both of these projects

and a few more.

Its mission is to take the repetition out of building a REST API.

Much like how Spring Boot assumes that if you put a vendor's database

in your class path it means that you want to have your app configured to use it.

Spring data rest assumes that if you've built a repository

that you intend to expose it as a rest collection and resource.

You can of course change that assumption but it's created for

you in the most common use case that you're gonna need.

There's another project in the Spring family and

that's called Spring HATEOAS which provides, as you might have guessed,

APIs that help you build discoverable rest representations.

Spring Data REST has this project installed and turned on by default.

This means it will automatically generate all the links and representations.

We'll walk through all those things here in a bit.

And I realize that I sound like one of those sketchy infomercials actors and

you're waiting for the catch.

But wait there's more, not only does it automatically produce a rest API it slices

POJO that dices JSON, it serves of schemas.

Now one of the problems in behind the scenes magic that this type of library

produces is that most of the time you have no idea what's being automated.

Now I'll do my best to point out what is happening behind the curtain

while not distract you from how to use this lifesaving tool to

rapidly build REST full APIs.

Like that sketchy information person might offer you

come on in take a test drive no obligation, money back guarantee.

And it's a free and open source so.

All right so let's get this thing installed.

So I'm going to make a new gradle project an IntelliJ IDEA.

So over here I've got Gradle selected it's got my version, I'm gonna click Next.

And for the Groupid were gonna do our favorite com.teamtreehouse.

And the Artifactid, let's have our jar be named course-reviews-api.

Okay, and on this page, let's make sure that we check create directories for

empty content routes automatically, so that those directories get built for

us and we don't need to do it, awesome.

Choose Next, and then finally that looks good.

Great, okay, so let's install our dependencies.

So let's open up our build.gradle file which is right here.

And I'm going to apply the suggestion so that the gradle wrapper comes along.

So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to change this 1.5 to 1.8 so

that we're using Java 8, right?

Now we definitely want to include the spring boot great all plugins.

So we get the auto versioning of our imports, right?

So to do that what you need to do first is you need to add a build script up here.

So we're gonna say buildscript, make the new

closure there and the repositories section and

on mavenCentral there is a plugin that we're gonna wanna use.

So classpath and here is org.springframework.

This is all in the teacher's notes by the way,

boot spring-boot-gradle-plugin.

And at the time of this video, we are 1.3.3.RELEASE,

I will try to keep that updated.

Okay, great so now we have a build script closure so

now what that means, is we can apply the plugin.

So we have a new plug in to apply.

Apply plugin and the name of that is spring-boot.

That brings along awesome stuff where we don't need to say the version of

the dependency that we're talking about.

So the dependency that we wanna add here is we

wanna say compile and we want to bring across

org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-star- ter-data-rest.

So it's spring-data-rest is the project.

And we want to have a database set up so let's set that up first.

Let's make sure that we're using spring-data so we want

org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-star- ter-data and

we're gonna use the JPA probably look at that I could just copy that line.

Okay, so let's have our app use an H2 in memory database.

Here is one of those, I can't believe this is all you have to do moments.

Are you ready for this?

Check this out, all you do is add the dependency compile and

that is com.h2database:h2.

Whoa, right?

Okay, and so let's go over here and let's refresh our Gradle project make sure that

we've got everything working, takes a little bit the first time you do this.

It's doing all the downloads and sorts everything out.

Okay, and I had a little unindexed remote maven imposed profound.

Let's go ahead and click this that will get indexed next time.

Okay, and let's expand our dependencies and let's take a look.

Whoa, look at all those, wow.

So what do you say that we make use of some of these?

Let's take a quick break and then let's start building out our resources.