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This month's OCI Java News Brief (JNB) is online now, in which Brian Gilstrap gives An Introduction to JAX-RS and Jersey.

Brian Gilstrap: If you aren't already involved in building RESTful web services, you may not be aware of JSR 311. JSR 311 is "JAX-RS: The Java™ API for RESTful Web Services". Its goal is to "develop an API for providing support for REST-ful (REpresentational State Transfer) Web Services in the Java Platform". If you aren't familiar with REST, you may want to read the Wikipedia page that describes REST. That page also has good links to other online resources regarding REST. In short, REST is an architectural approach to building robust, easy-to-use web services that are well-connected to themselves and easy to connect to each other. It follows the basic paradigm of the world wide web as you browse it every day, and is a powerful approach to building web services.

The JAX-RS specification describes an API for developers that greatly simplifies the process of building (RESTful) web services. The fundamental idea behind JAX-RS is that developers spend little or no time marshalling and unmarshalling requests and responses, and instead build Plain Old Java Objects (POJOs) for individual resources and for collections of resources. The JAX-RS implementation coordinates with the web server or container to make those resources available via URLs and to convert the HTTP requests into Java objects, and to convert Java object resource representations into HTTP responses. The reference implementation for JAX-RS is called "Jersey" and the project is hosted on the dev.java.net site. Jersey itself is implemented for Java 5 (and later) and can be integrated with a number of different containers and HTTP servers.

A particularly compelling way to use Jersey is to combine it with the Project Grizzly HTTP server. Project Grizzly provides a high performance HTTP server, and it makes building standalone web services amazingly easy. All of the examples presented here use this approach. However, Jersey can be just as well be integrated with many other web containers, including just about any standard servlet container or J2EE environment, such as Tomcat, WebLogic, or WebSphere.

In addition to the server-side API and implementation, Jersey provides a client API, used to write clients of RESTful Web Services. The client API is also used by service implementations which are themselves clients of other RESTful services.

Brian has been researching this topic for quite some time and wrote a series of blog entries as he went along. He will be presenting on this topic at the St. Louis JUG in November.

Incidentally, Brian first presented at the St. Louis JUG more than 12 years ago, in January 1998. The topic—RMI and CORBA. Distributed computing never gets old.

Anybody want to predict what topic Brian will cover at the JUG in 2021?

OK. Enough of the nostalgia nonsense. Go read the article. I will do that now!