JAX-RS - Building RESTful Web Services in Java

Speaker

Mario Klaver

Track

Enterprise

Description

Have you ever wondered why there is so much overhead in designing a simple web service like ‘GetCustomerDetails’ using SOAP?

I have. All the time.

Why do I have to POST over 400 characters (yes, I have actually counted it) to tell the server that I want the details of customer x? For every request I have a lot of extra luggage called an envelope
containing a header and body element. Isn’t it weird in the first place to POST such a request? Wouldn’t it be more natural to do a GET? Besides, if I had used a GET my request could be bookmarked or cached by a proxy server.

Luckily there has been an alternative for ages, called REST, which stands for Representational State Transfer. Unfortunately, up until recently it was harder to build a RESTful web service than a SOAP web service in Java. This all changed with JSR-311: JAX-RS. Now you can build a RESTful web service within 5 minutes and I shall prove it.

This presentation will explain the REST principles and will guide you step by step in developing your first RESTful web service. But REST has its challenges too, and I will outline them for you. At the end of the presentation you know there is more than SOAP when it comes to web services and you have enough knowledge to choose between REST and SOAP in a particular situation.

REST or REST in peace.

Level

Intermediate

Prerequisites

Java 5

Agenda

Why SOAP is evil
oA post for everything
o Potentially performance issues
REST comes to the rescue!
o Introduction RESTful web services
o Advantages and new challenges
REST in Java…the hard way
o Servlets
REST in Java…the JAX-RS way
o Introduction JAX-RS
Demo JAX-RS
o My first RESTful web service
o Different output formats (JSON, XML,…)
JAX-RS.equals(REST) == false
o What is not covered by JAX-RS
SOAP and REST a happy marriage?
o SOAP 1.2 features supporting REST
o WSDL 2.0 features supporting REST
Conclusion

Mario Klaver  Endpoint ICT Mario Klaver (mario.klaver@endpoint.nl) works as a software architect at Endpoint ICT. He has over 11 years of experience in information technology and is an expert in the field of application integration and Service Oriented Architectures. In this field, he has already done several successful projects.