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Create json rest api without writing or integrating any code

I've 2 questions about Java Rest APIs
1'st:
I would like to create a Rest API with Java Servlets for using in the mobile applications(IOS and Android)
and before doing that I would like to clarify the rest api content. However as much as I search through google all I found was automatic API creators from your Java code. But what I want is different first I want to document our Json Rest API so mobile and server developers can start to work independently.
Do you know any tool for that?
2'nd:
What I want to achive in our java server application is simple. Get simple json requests from mobile clients and do some database query and respond back with simple json objects.
For achiving this do I need to use any additional Rest API framework such as spring mvc (or something else) or just using Java Servlets and parse the request in doPost method and respond it there
Which one do you suggest?
Thanks

Restlet Studio (http://restlet.com/technical-resources/restlet-studio) or APISpark (http://restlet.com/products/apispark/) can bring you what you expect.
Restlet Studio allows you to define / design you API with a Web IDE: resources and their methods, representations (exchanged data structures). You can then have access to corresponding Swagger content and generate online client SDKs and even server skeletons for your API (this is internally based on Swagger Codegen)...
To implement your RESTful applications, Restlet can help you. It's a Java REST framework to access and / or implement RESTful applications. Restlet can be used within a servlet container with its servlet extension (see this link https://github.com/restlet/restlet-tutorial/blob/master/modules/org.restlet.tutorial.markdown/02_Server_Side/04_Server_Deployment/02_Servlet_Deployment.md).
Hope it helps you.
Thierry

I aggree with Stephan comment.
With Spring Boot and Spring Data Rest, the only code you will need to write is the mapping between your DB and your DAO Entities.
To document your API before writing it, you can use in fact any regular tools.
REST APIs don't have anything specific compared to others APIs to be documented.
Much of the documentation of APIs I've written were using Ms-Word...
Swagger provide a Json syntax to document a REST API, but it is mainly useful when used with Swagger-Ui, which allow to request the deployed server dynamically. You can use Swagger for your documentation, but as there will be no already existing server, I'm not sure it is worth the cost of learning its syntax. The main benefits is to give you constraints (like predefined fields) to follow.
By the way, I think that writing a REST Api Mapping or just document it takes the same amount of time, so I'm not sure it is really worth making all the documentation in a stand-alone way.

Build an Web UI with AngularJS for a java project?

I would like to add a Web User Interface for an existing Java project I did time ago. I learned basics of AngularJS on codeschool.com courses and now I know how to send an http or REST request to get data for my web UI.
My Java project has a set of methods that elaborate some data from a local database and return integers or integers arrays.
The goal of the interface would be to show a bunch of charts and data directly from that Java project.
What would be the most appropriate way to do this? I heard of implementing REST services on my Java project but it seems overkill for the purpose and i'm totally confused by all the frameworks for this. What would you use?
Thanks everyone for your answers!

I would use SprinvMVC to provide data from server to client side.
Here is my project from which you can start and learn basics :
https://github.com/xwid/thaimaster
Basicly you should create spring controllers mapped to urls, by doing it this way, you will be able to retrive server data using angular js.
http://www.javabeat.net/spring-mvc-angularjs-integration/

If you don't want to use a full REST framework such as Jersey, another possibility would be to use an embeddable HTTP server (there are several) and handle the requests yourself. This would mean that requests to something like /myapp/ would return your AngularJS filled HTML page, and requests to /resources/* would provide with REST functionality.
This would give you a standalone Java program that doesn't need a servlet container, but it would be a somewhat hacky solution. Not production grade, but you'd probably learn something from having to handle the HTTP traffic yourself.

With the Spring Framework's SprigBoot, it's quite easy to implement a REST service and have a runnable java application. You can follow this Building a RESTful Web Service guide from spring.io. They are clear and quickly understandable.
Also if you are not already familiar, through these guides you can have a glimpse of gradle and maven as well.

Android JSON vs REST

im starting with web services. I'm working in a project that needs to communicate Android with a web server and I'd like to save some time chosing the appropriate protocol for the communication.
Between JSON ,REST and SOAP:
Which ones can I run in a non-dedicated server?
Whats the best choice for a high trafic server?
Thanks in advance

JSON and REST are not mututally exclusive. JSON is a data format that the REST interface can return.
You may run either on a non dedicated server. I would personally choose REST for rapid prototyping on Android as it is easier to get up and running. (With SOAP you will probably want to have a schema which takes time to put together)

There's a good comparison between REST and SOAP on the REST wiki article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer#Concept
REST is more of a framework than a communications protocol. JSON and SOAP could be use to create a RESTful application.
If you're writing something with many resources, I'd use REST as it is far more structured. There are also a lot of libraries that will set most of things up for you. I find JSON and SOAP are better for custom functionality that you want to hack together quickly. They can be lightweight, but less structured.

Implementation of web service

I just want to implement a service in java that will:
take some arguments, then search the database
return the JSON object of the fetched data
I need help to identify the ways through which I can implement this thing.
e.g. Suppose I am getting the name of the book as argument I want to render.
On service part, I have to fetch book data and convert it to JSON and write/return to response.
I was looking at the Apache Axis2 but I am not sure that I am going in the right direction.
So, pls help.
Need guidelines not implementation.
Thanks

I would suggest using JAX-RS based services which would be ideal for your scenario as you want json data. These are pretty easy to get started with. Jersey is a widely used frameworks. Also see RESTEasy.

If you are returning the data in JSON then you probably don't need to implement a full web service, which uses XML for both the request and the response.
A normal dynamic web application (written as a Java Servlet) will be able to read request parameters in the HTTP payload and return a JSON-encoded HTTP response.
However you need to consider your clients; if they are only able to access web services then you need to forget about a JSON response and simply objectify the response. However if the clients can access web resources without issue then go with the servlet approach.
If you need to go with web services then look at the Metro 2 framework.

One way to do this is to keep it standards-based.
If you are using the JEE5/6 framework, your best bet would be to go with JAX-WS - comes built-in with the JSE too (if I remember correctly)
You really just have to annotate a POJO with #WebService to achieve this.
Regarding creating a JSON response, a good bet is to stick with the implementation from http://code.google.com/p/google-gson/ ; simple and straightforward

Axis2 can handle/support the webservice related part, iaw, transforming java objects into JSON and vice-versa and providing an easy-to-use API for the communication part.
Hibernate or JPA could be useful for database related tasks, although it might be easier to just use JDBC to send some simple SQL commands to the database (especially if the database already existst).

Connecting a PHP front-end to a back-end java service

I am currently using various back-end services and I want to use PHP to simply query these services and perform the final page construction. These services could be coded in any number of programming langauges such as Erlang, Java, Python etc. However I am unsure of the best way to actually interface the back-end services with the web app. Requests to these services would be both synchronous and asynchronous. Would I use something like SOAP or JSON-RPC??
Any help greatly appreciated.

You might want to have a look to Thrift:
http://incubator.apache.org/thrift/

I think you are on the right track
using JSON-RPC. I don't like SOAP at
all because it is just way too
complicated in my opinion
I would create an interface(document it properly like for example twitter) which I can easily test using cURL from the command line.
I think Twitter has a pretty good(not perfect) API.
Also ProgrammableWeb.com is a good place to look up API's(see how other people create API's).

This is a general question how to design web services and there is a hype using REST-like web services. This way you simply can call a given URL (which is even user readable). This increase the interoperability of your web service so you can mix the programming languages which use the REST interface. IMHO its easier than using a SOAP like web service as you simply calls GET on an url like http://www.example.com/user/5/ (think of it as the mod_rewrite of web services)

I'd use NuSOAP (to consume java webservices).