SPRING-DATA-REST Backend with AngularJS frontend
My prefer for rest api for angularjs is RESTANGULAR module...
In the site you can see many examples that how they deal with Rest calls and really good documentation and good community as well...
In this example which is from spring example SPRING.IO they uses $http, but I should say that Restangular uses $http as well, so basically you can say that Restangular is extended version of $http...
and for the last you can look for $resource...
I will update my answer If I will find something new...
Here are some links to AngularJS apps consuming Spring RESTful services
At the moment, I think that angular-hal is the best library to consume Spring Data Rest output and stay with its philosophy of discovering url through relations.
The home page: https://github.com/LuvDaSun/angular-hal
and some examples :