Eugen Paraschiv: REST course

[Martin Bechtle]

Hi Eugen,

I have always been wondering about Spring's support for RESTful architectures. It certainly does support making a REST interface with Spring MVC, but once you start using other features like Spring Security, the way it handles user authentication and CSRF token generation, it seems to me that Spring is tightly bound with the stateful Servlet implementation. Would you recommend avoiding Spring Security when building a RESTful interface, or rather try to persist session information with Spring Session? Or is there an easy way with REST to handle authentication and csrf without relying on servlet's sessions?

[Eugen Paraschiv]

That's definitely an interesting question. And your notes are were definitely true a few years back, but Spring is always moving forward. Now, I'd say that Spring Security plays well with the RESTful approach in all but one scenarios - and that is a fully custom token based security mechanism (similar to what AWS uses). But if you need a fully-stateless mechanism, there's good support for OAuth 2 + JWT. And of course a lot of other options.
Hope that helps. Cheers,
Eugen.