Building RESTful APIs with Spring Boot

Complete guide to building production-ready REST APIs using MVC architecture, DTOs, validation, and best practices.

Ramjee Prasad

Dec 22, 2025

15 min

🏗️ MVC Architecture Layers

Controller

HTTP Layer

Service

Business Logic

Repository

Data Access

Model/DTO

Data Objects

The Model represents your database entity. It maps directly to a database table using JPA annotations.

User.java

@Entity
@Table(name = "users")
@Data  // Lombok for getters/setters
@NoArgsConstructor
@AllArgsConstructor
public class User {
    
    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY)
    private Long id;
    
    @Column(nullable = false)
    private String name;
    
    @Column(unique = true, nullable = false)
    private String email;
    
    @Column(nullable = false)
    private String password;
    
    @CreatedDate
    private LocalDateTime createdAt;
    
    @LastModifiedDate
    private LocalDateTime updatedAt;
}

🔢 API Versioning

URL Versioning ✅

/api/v1/users

Most common and recommended

Header Versioning

X-API-Version: 1

Cleaner URLs, harder to test

🎉 You're Ready!

You now have all the building blocks for a production-ready REST API. Remember: Controllers handle HTTP, Services handle logic, Repositories handle data.

Read: Spring Boot Annotations