In the earlier chapter, you learned how to build a Spring MVC application. These applications facilitate the user to serve through Web only for the Java platform. What if some other platform wants to use the functionalities developed by us? Yes, we will need functionalities that are platform-independent. In this chapter, we will discuss how to develop such platform-independent services using RESTful web services to address the following topics:

• What is a web service?
• Importance of web services
• Types of web services
• RESTful web services
• Developing Spring RESTful web services
• How to use RESTTemplate and Postman to test web services
• The presentation of data using message converters and content negotiation