rest-proxy

rest-proxy has moved into a private Git repository. No further maintenance is intended here in this GitHub repository, which has been archived and is now read-only.

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A Simple server side REST proxy service written in Groovy

Purpose

This library provides one option for integrating one web application with the REST API provided by another web application. Typically, a web application that wanted to issue XmlHttpRequests to another web application's REST API would use CORS. The assumption here is that both web applications use compatible single-sign-on technologies so an authenticated user in the first is generally an authenticated user in the second.

But what if the web application hosting the REST API doesn't support CORS? That's where rest-proxy can help.

Without rest-proxy, imagine how you would have to integrate these two applications:

1. The application hosting the REST API will likely have separate authentication mechanism, say a "service account" using HTTP Basic/Digest.
2. In order for your web application to make REST calls, your application is going to have to have its own REST Controllers which are simply a Proxy for the other application. You'll need a proxy method/controller for every method on the target REST API you want to call.
3. Those controllers will be pretty boiler plate, binding the same URL/query pattern that the target endpoint supports, then delegating to some rest client configured with your "service account."

Items number 2 and 3 above are provided with rest-proxy.

Requirements

1. Java 7+
2. Spring Framework

Getting Started

• Add the following dependency to your project:

        <dependency>
          <groupId>edu.wisc.my.restproxy</groupId>
          <artifactId>rest-proxy-core</artifactId>
          <version>2.0.0</artifactId>
        </dependency>

• A Spring @Configuration class is provided, add @Import(edu.wisc.my.restproxy.config.RestProxyConfiguration) on one of your existing @Configuration classes. If you are using Spring's XML configuration instead, add the following to your Spring application context:

    <mvc:annotation-driven/>
    <context:component-scan base-package="edu.wisc.my.restproxy">
       <context:exclude-filter type="regex" expression="edu.wisc.my.restproxy.config.*"/>
    </context:component-scan>

• Configure a url-pattern for the Spring DispatcherServlet. If you are writing a My UW App, you may not have the DispatcherServlet already configured. Add the following to web.xml:

    <servlet>
        <servlet-name>proxy</servlet-name>
        <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
        <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
    </servlet>
    <servlet-mapping>
        <servlet-name>rest-proxy-api</servlet-name>
        <url-pattern>/proxy/*</url-pattern>
    </servlet-mapping>

• Now we have to configure the proxy. rest-proxy gets its configuration about the target REST APIs you want to proxy from the Spring @Environment. If you have a @PropertySource already defined, you can add the necessary properties there, or you can choose to add a separate @PropertySource (it doesn't matter, they all end up in @Environment no matter how many @PropertySources you have). The most basic configuration available is as follows:

target.url=http://somewhere.wisc.edu/something

This configuration will result in the url 'http://localhost:8080/proxy/target/foo' (assuming http://localhost:8080 is your web application's address) being a proxy for 'http://somewhere.wisc.edu/something/foo'. If 'http://somewhere.wisc.edu/something' requires service account credentials, the configuration expands to:

target.url=http://somewhere.wisc.edu/something
target.username=someuser
target.password=somepassword

• Secure your configuration! This is a complicated topic and there is no simple explanation. Some ideas and samples are covered in the reference manual.

Quickstart an example

Prerequirement

You need to install gradle 2.x for this to work. Download here: https://services.gradle.org/distributions/gradle-2.14-bin.zip

The rest-proxy-boot module in this project is a Spring Boot project that includes rest-proxy-core. It is intended for demonstration purposes.

Running rest-proxy-boot

• Supply endpoint configuration - you can copy application.properties.example to get started, or add a command-line flag, e.g. --todos.uri=http://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/todos
• Run gradle bootRun to start the server
• Verify in your browser

OR

• Run gradle build to build a standalone jar
• Start the server by running java -jar rest-proxy-boot/build/libs/rest-proxy-boot-<VERSION>.jar

More documentation

See docs for more documentation about this project.