First GA of RESTeasy Released

Posted by Mark Little on Jan 21, 2009

Sections

Architecture & Design,

Enterprise Architecture

Topics

SOA ,

REST

Tags

JBoss

We've mentioned in the past about the plethora of different REST-based frameworks and JSR311 compliant implementations. One of the relative new comers to this space is RESTeasy, lead by Bill Burke, the first GA of which has now been released. According to the release announcement:

JBoss RESTEasy is a framework that allows you to write RESTFul Web Services in Java. It is a fully certified and portable implementation of JAX-RS specification.

Of course being a JBoss project there is good integration with JBoss Application Server, but it can run in any servlet container running JDK 5 or higher. There's also a client framework aspect to RESTeasy, something which is not part of the JAX-RS standard. Other features in the release include:

• Embeddedable server implementation for junit testing
• Rich set of providers for: XML, JSON, YAML, Fastinfoset, Atom, etc.
• JAXB marshalling into XML, JSON, Fastinfoset, and Atom as well as wrappers for arrays, lists, and sets of JAXB Objects.
• Asynchronous HTTP (Comet) abstractions for JBoss Web, Tomcat 6, and Servlet 3.0
• EJB, Spring, and Spring MVC integration
• Client framework that leverages JAX-RS annotations so that you can write HTTP clients easily (JAX-RS only defines server bindings)

We've mentioned before that there are comparisons between the various JAX-RS implementations and so far RESTeasy comes out well. In a recent entry on Integrating JAX-RS and Spring MVC, Solomon Duskis reports that:

RESTEasy can now be used with the Spring MVC DispatcherServlet. All you need to do is . This has quite a few benefits: 

• You can manage JAX-RS Resources along side SprngMVC Controllers, or Wicket Objects or Tapestry or Struts2 Actions. JAX-RS can be set up to handle XML and JSON interactions, and your favorite MVC framework can handle the HTML creation.
• Your JAX-RS resources can be full-fledged MVC Controllers by returning a Spring ModelAndView. It can be a JSP view, a Freemarker, XSLT or Velocity template, or an RSS view.

And concludes with:

I used RESTEasy because I was able to grok the code-base quicker than the other JAX-RS implementations.

Only time will tell how well RESTeasy continues to grow in this crowded space. But first impressions indicate that users now at least have a good selection of alternatives when building their REST-based applications.

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