What is Jersey?
Jersey is a implementation of
JAX-RS which is a standard for
RESTful Web Services.
Why Jersey is needed when creating RESTful web services?
Jersey is not a must when creating RESTful web services. But Jersey makes our lives easier when creating RESTful services. Below tutorial will show you how.
First create a new web project and name it as
RestExample.
Download and add
asm-all-x.x.x.jar and
jersey-bundle-x.x.x.jar to your project.
Configure the
Jersey ServletContainer in your
web.xml as below.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app .....>
<servlet>
<servlet-name>jersy-servlet</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>com.sun.jersey.spi.container.servlet.ServletContainer</servlet-class>
<load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>
<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>jersy-servlet</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
</web-app>
Note that all the requests match the above configured url pattern(
/*) are sent through the
Jersey ServletContainer and if any of them matches with a url pattern of a registered web service(
@Path) Jersey point the request to that service.
Now you are ready to create your first RESTful web service with Jersey. Create a new java class and name it as
UserManagementService. Now change your class as below and your web service is ready.
import javax.ws.rs.GET;
import javax.ws.rs.Path;
import javax.ws.rs.Produces;
import javax.ws.rs.core.Response;
@Path("/user")
public class UserManagementService {
@GET
@Path("/profile")
@Produces("application/xml")
public Response getUserProfile() {
String retVal = "<user>" +
"<username>John</username>" +
"<email>john@example.com</email>" +
"</user>";
return Response.status(200).entity(retVal).build();
}
}
This simple web service returns a user profile in xml format.
Enter below url in your browser.
http://localhost:8080/RestExample/user/profile
You will get below result.
Note that the
annotations are the most important part which convert your plain java class in to a RESTful web service. Those are explained below.
@Path("/user") - If a request url matches this pattern Jersey redirects the request to this class.
@Path("/profile") - If a request redirected to this class matches the pattern "/profile", this method is responsible to serve the request.
@GET - Indicates that this method supports HTTP GET requests. Similarly other valid annotations are " @POST, @PUT, @DELETE and @HEAD". Note only one of these annotations can be applied for one method.
@Produces - This is the response type of this service. This is set as the Content-Type header of the http response. As you know this is used by the browsers to render the output.
Following annotations are also frequently used.
@Consumes - This can be used to specify the media types that can be consumed by the service.
@QueryParam - This is used to extract query string parameters from the request URL.
@PathParam - This is used to get data from request url.
Below is a simple web service which uses
@QueryParam, @PathParam and
@HeaderParam annotations.
import javax.ws.rs.GET;
import javax.ws.rs.Path;
import javax.ws.rs.PathParam;
import javax.ws.rs.HeaderParam;
import javax.ws.rs.Produces;
import javax.ws.rs.QueryParam;
import javax.ws.rs.core.Response;
@Path("/hello")
public class HelloService {
@GET
@Path("/{firstname}/{lastname}")
@Produces("text/plain")
public Response getWelcomeMessage(@QueryParam("company") String company,
@PathParam("firstname") String firstName,
@PathParam("lastname") String lastName
@HeaderParam("Authorization") String token) {
System.out.println("Auth token is " + token);
String retVal = "Welcome to " + company + " " + firstName + " " + lastName;
return Response.status(200).entity(retVal).build();
}
}
Enter below url in your browser and see the result.
http://localhost:8080/RestExample/hello/John/Daniel?company=ABC
The output will be as below.