What is a good technology stack for a java web based application with REST support?

Question

Evening all :)

I'm looking to create a Java web application. I envisage that it will use Spring web MVC and JSPs, however I would like to expose certain functionality as REST calls so I can create an android client.

Does spring offer anything to help me in this area? How can I keep the REST code and the web front end code separate yet not have to maintain essentially 2 versions of my application (one for the web, one for REST clients).

Not looking for spoon feeding, just some pointers of where I should start reading.

Answer 1

As others have mentioned, Spring has pretty good in-built REST support now. When combined with annotations, this allows really simple set-up of a RESTful API. Spring can be configured with different view resolvers , which can automatically respond with a different view of the data depending on the Accept header for example. So you could return either JSON or JSP automatically from the same data, see the ContentNegotiatingViewResolver . Your Controller and Model can then be common and implemented once, leaving the work in the View layer.

I've used this approach before to return JSON when the request was via AJAX and a JSP view built with the same data when accessed by a browser.

Answer 2

Jersey is a pretty nifty tool. It integrates well with tools like Spring, Guice, and Jackson to provide you a pretty seamless way to create RESTful resources.

Answer 3

Jersey is pretty simple, works well, and serves as the reference implementation to boot. Plus, it has some nice REST client support, much of which will probably make it into the JAX-RS spec.

In terms of marrying that with Spring MVC, I'd recommend you make sure you model your application so that you have facades (Service classes) that provide all the core functionality you need and then simply reference them as needed in your MVC code or REST code. You shouldn't be duplicating business logic

Answer 4

You can do this using Spring 3.0. Spring 3.0 came out with the ability to specify @PathVariable s to pull values out of the URL path (previously this was not easy in Spring MVC).

You would also use @RequestMapping to specify the HTTP method(s) each method in your controller should respond to.

I've also use Spring Security to implement an API key type of functionality. This way you can restrict access to your API in a way that is easy for REST clients to implement. I had to extend org.springframework.web.filter.GenericFilterBean and add a the proper Authentication like this

SecurityContextHolder.getContext().setAuthentication(apiKeyAuth)

Answer 5

There's a new REST API in Spring 3.0 MVC:

http://blog.springsource.com/2009/03/08/rest-in-spring-3-mvc/

http://www.springsource.org/download

Answer 6

Apache CXF integrates well with Spring and offers many method for exposing services. From the overview section of the CXF homepage:

CXF helps you build and develop services using frontend programming APIs, like JAX-WS and JAX-RS. These services can speak a variety of protocols such as SOAP, XML/HTTP, RESTful HTTP, or CORBA and work over a variety of transports such as HTTP, JMS or JBI.