Not long ago I worked on a team charged with building up a Java-based REST infrastructure. Our goals were to first support what was then an emerging specification for Java-based RESTful services called JAX-RS. Beyond that, we had thoughts of building an entire framework, both server and client, around RESTful services written in Java. Some of the people I worked with on that team are now part of the team that is responsible for an open source implementation called Apache Wink which embodies some of our early ideas and much more.
Developers have been implementing RESTful services in Java for a long, long time, so what`s the deal with JAX-RS and an entire framework? Well, the way developers have been implementing REST services typically involves writing their own custom servlet. Within the servlet they write custom code to route incoming requests to the proper back-end resources. This can be extremely simple, but it can also become quite involved depending on the number of resources, the degree to which they are nested, depend on content negotiation capabilities, and more. Why not turn a lot of this over to a container capable of providing such function?
A JAX-RS aware container can provide a lot of the function that developers previously had to code in their servlets. In such a container users can package and deploy a Java bean with annotations that declare a resource and describe that resource to the container.
Source:
http://apache.sys-con.com/node/1166423
Developers have been implementing RESTful services in Java for a long, long time, so what`s the deal with JAX-RS and an entire framework? Well, the way developers have been implementing REST services typically involves writing their own custom servlet. Within the servlet they write custom code to route incoming requests to the proper back-end resources. This can be extremely simple, but it can also become quite involved depending on the number of resources, the degree to which they are nested, depend on content negotiation capabilities, and more. Why not turn a lot of this over to a container capable of providing such function?
A JAX-RS aware container can provide a lot of the function that developers previously had to code in their servlets. In such a container users can package and deploy a Java bean with annotations that declare a resource and describe that resource to the container.
Source:
http://apache.sys-con.com/node/1166423
