So, what is the simplest, smallest hello world we can implement with JAX-RS? The Jersey site provides an example and it's surprisingly small. We will start with an example almost identical to the hello world example from the Jersey documentation and grow from there.
If we ignore the package statements and imports, there are two files of about ten lines each. The first one is our main class that starts up the service and generally gets things going. Later examples will show why this is it's own class separate from the rest of a service's implementation. Here's the class in its entirety:
package net.gilstraps.server;
import com.sun.grizzly.http.SelectorThread;
import com.sun.jersey.api.container.grizzly.GrizzlyWebContainerFactory;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.Map;
public class Main {
public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
Map<String,String> initParams = new HashMap<String, String>();
initParams.put( "com.sun.jersey.config.property.packages", "net.gilstraps.server" );
SelectorThread selector = GrizzlyWebContainerFactory.create( "http://localhost:9998/", initParams );
//noinspection ResultOfMethodCallIgnored
System.in.read();
threadSelector.stopEndpoint();
System.exit(0);
}
}
The code here is pretty easy to understand, so let's look at it. These two lines are a crucial part of configuring Jersey:
Map<String,String> initParams = new HashMap<String, String>();
initParams.put( "com.sun.jersey.config.property.packages", "net.gilstraps.server" );
With these lines, we tell Jersey which java packages should be examined at runtime to find classes which implement RESTful resources. We've specified that Jersey should look at the "net.gilstraps.server" package and examine the classes in that package to find ones which have JAX-RS annotations on them. Those annotations tell a JAX-RS implementation what resources each class serves up to clients and what URI's those resources have. There are also annotations for specifying which HTTP methods match up to which Java methods. We'll look at these shortly.
The next line actually instantiates the Grizzly HTTP server, telling it the base URI for all the URL's it should support and providing it with initialization parameters:
SelectorThread selector = GrizzlyWebContainerFactory.create( "http://localhost:9998/", initParams );
The call returns us a SelectorThread which represents the control object for the HTTP server. With the string "http://localhost:9998/", we are telling the service to use port 9998 of the host named 'localhost'. Grizzly has built-in knowledge of Jersey and our inclusion of the "com.sun.jersey.config.property.packages" parameter causes Jersey to used to provide the web service.
The remaining lines provide a simple means to shut down the service gracefully. The program reads input from System.in and then shuts things down cleanly. So if you run the program on a command line you can get it to shut down without killing it:
System.in.read();
threadSelector.stopEndpoint();
System.exit(0);
So, where is our cliched "hello world" resource? There is one more class used to implement our service, also quite small. Here it is:
package net.gilstraps.server;
import javax.ws.rs.Produces;
import javax.ws.rs.GET;
import javax.ws.rs.Path;
import javax.swing.text.html.HTML;
@Path("/helloworld")
public class HelloWorldResource {
@GET @Produces("text/plain")
public String getClichedMessage() {
return "Hello Stage 1";
}
}
This class is almost a POJO (plain old Java object). It doesn't implement a particular interface, or extend a class. It has a very simple method ('getClichedMessage') that returns a regular Java string. How can this implement a hello world web service? The key to making it a JAX-RS resource class is the annotations. Let's examine each one:
@Path
The '@Path' annotation attached to the class itself tells a JAX-RS what URI or set of URIs this class serves. In this case, we are specifying just the URI of "/helloworld". Thus, with the base URI of "http://localhost:9998" we would access this resource via the URI "http://localhost:9998/helloworld".
@GET
The @GET annotation on a method tells JAX-RS that the Java method implements HTTP's GET verb (the verb your browser uses every time you visit a web page). So JAX-RS now knows that a client doing a GET of "http://localhost:9998/helloworld" should result in the 'getClichedMessage' method being invoked.
@Produces
The @Produces annotation tells JAX-RS that the MIME type of the resource returned by 'getClichedMessage' is "text/plan", which is the MIME type for a plain text document. We've aimed for a minimal service here, so we're going for the simplest type of resource we can. It's also possible to return other kinds of entities as the result of a request, and it's even possible to use separate conversion classes to convert different kinds of Java objects into particular kinds of response entities (like a JPEG image, for example). But this service just returns a text document.
At this point, JAX-RS knows everything it needs to know to support a client doing a GET on the resource identified by the URI "http://localhost:9998/helloworld". When we compile and run our service, it doesn't output anything at first. But if we open a browser and go to the URL, we see some output from Grizzly/Jersey:
Jun 12, 2009 9:02:51 PM com.sun.jersey.api.core.PackagesResourceConfig init
INFO: Scanning for root resource and provider classes in the packages:
net.gilstraps.server
Jun 12, 2009 9:02:51 PM com.sun.jersey.api.core.PackagesResourceConfig init
INFO: Root resource classes found:
class net.gilstraps.server.HelloWorldResource
Jun 12, 2009 9:02:51 PM com.sun.jersey.api.core.PackagesResourceConfig init
INFO: Provider classes found:
From this we can see that Grizzly brings Jersey in to handle the request we made with the browser. Jersey then scans for classes which serve up REST resources. It tells us that it found our class:
Jun 12, 2009 9:02:51 PM com.sun.jersey.api.core.PackagesResourceConfig init
INFO: Root resource classes found:
class net.gilstraps.server.HelloWorldResource
Even more interesting, the browser where we made the GET request gets the string that was returned from 'getClichedMessage' as the result of it's GET request:
And that's a simple 'hello world' implemented using JAX-RS with Jersey and Grizzly.
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