Tips : Implementing RESTful Web Services in Java

Welcome to the Enterprise Java Technologies Tech Tips for November 16, 2007. Here you'll get tips on using enterprise Java technologies and APIs, such as those in Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE).

You can now read the Enterprise Java Technologies Tech Tips online as a web log.

This tip covers Implementing RESTful web services in Java.

The tip was developed using an open source reference implementation of Java EE 5 called GlassFish, and the open source NetBeans IDE 5.5.1. You can download GlassFish from the GlassFish Community Downloads page. You can download the NetBeans IDE 5.5.1 from the NetBeans page.

Any use of this code and/or information below is subject to the license terms.

Implementing RESTful Web Services in Java
This Tech Tip will show you how to write RESTful web services in Java that conform to the JAX-RS: Java API for RESTful Web Services (JSR-311) specification and its reference implementation - Jersey. You'll learn some of the principles of Representational State Transfer (REST) and get introduced to JAX-RS and Jersey.

The tip uses a sample application to demonstrate some of the JAX-RS concepts and techniques. You can obtain the sample by downloading the latest Jersey snapshot from the Jersey downloads page. The code examples in the tip are taken from the source code of the sample application (which is included in the download package).

An Introduction to RESTful Web Services
Representational State Transfer (REST) is a style of software architecture for distributed systems such as the World Wide Web. The term was introduced in the doctoral dissertation of Roy Fielding in 2000, and has since come into widespread use in the networking community. An important concept in REST is the existence of resources, each of which can be referred to using a global identifier, that is, a URI. In order to manipulate these resources, components of the network, clients and servers, communicate using a standardized interface such as HTTP and exchange representations of these resources.

RESTful web services are services built using the RESTful architectural style. Building web services using the RESTful approach is emerging as a popular alternative to using SOAP-based technologies for deploying services on the Internet, due to its lightweight nature and the ability to transmit data directly over HTTP..

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 Courtesy: http://java.sun.com/