RESTful Web Service - Spring Tutorial - Localhost Cannot Be Found - Is This Expected Behaviour?

[Simon Ritchie]

Hi guys,

I''m trying to educate myself in the way of Spring and RESTful web services so I completed this tutorial from the official Spring site. Everything works fine - the .jar file was completed as expected - but when I click on http://localhost:8080/greeting two things happen

* My browser asks if I'd like to download the file named greeting.json from localhost
* If I just go to http://localhost:8080/ I get a message saying "The webpage cannot be found"

My questions are what do I need to do to activate the local host and does the fact that I could download the greeting.json file mean that the tutorial is behaving as expected?

I'm a complete newbie when it comes to web services so apologies if I've asked some basic questions. I just don't see anywhere on that page where it mentions anything about the localhost.

Thanks

[Karthik Shiraly]

What browser are you trying the localhost:8080/greeting URL on? Do you see the same behavior from other browsers?

As for "webpage not found", it's expected because the only valid request mapping currently is a "/greeting" REST endpoint.
If you want root URL to show something, it should be mapped to some controller that returns some view.

[Simon Ritchie]

I'm using Internet Explorer 11. I've just tried what happens with Chrome and this is the result for the localhost

Whitelabel Error Page

This application has no explicit mapping for /error, so you are seeing this as a fallback.

Fri Mar 18 14:50:05 GMT 2016
There was an unexpected error (type=Not Found, status=404).
No message available

I should point out that I'm not running Tomcat or any web hosting service at all. I've literally just put this project together in Eclipse Luna and run it.

[Karthik Shiraly]

Is that error you see for the localhost:8080/greeting URL? What does "localhost:8080/greeting" give in Chrome?

Spring boot starts an embedded servlet container (embedded tomcat is the default, I think). That's how it's listening on 8080.

[Simon Ritchie]

Karthik Shiraly wrote:What does "localhost:8080/greeting" give in Chrome?

In Chrome that URL gives me the following

{"id":1,"content":"Hello, World!"}

[Karthik Shiraly]

That means the REST endpoint is working fine.
It was just an IE issue - I guess it doesn't know how to handle "application/json" MIME type and asks you to download it instead of displaying it. A quick search says some registry hack can force it to display the JSON. Anyway, it doesn't matter because REST services are meant to be consumed programatically. Write a javascript ajax client to consume that JSON, and it'll work fine - even on IE.

[Simon Ritchie]

That's great - thanks Karthik.