Things have been rather hectic over past few weeks with work and floods and all. Some how, I actually managed to get some much need documentation together for RESTEasy. Right now, the docs don’t reflect the current state of the code, but more of where things are headed. Feedback is welcome and appreciated.

Lately I’ve been getting a lot of great feedback and plenty of great suggestions for RESTEasy. As a better way to collaborate, I’ve set up a forum here for just such topics. Look forward to hearing from more of you.

One area that had annoyed me about RESTEasy is dealing with JAXB annotated Entity Beans that get returned from a Stateless Session Bean. Once the SLSB returns the entity, the transaction is committed but the object graph that will be needed for the XML representation may not be fully initialized, thus resulting in a LazyInitializationException [...]

So far, I have gotten some very useful feedback for RESTEasy. One excellent set of questions came from the rest-discuss group on Yahoo!:

How do you map different parts of the namespace to the same component? What, for instance, do GETs to the following resources result in:

  http://localhost/resteasy/contacts/12345/something
  http://localhost/resteasy/contacts/12345?myparam=whatever

The short answer is that you could map [...]

Just FYI to anyone who is interested, the project page for RESTEasy is up here and the sources are now in Subversion on Source Forge. Please keep in mind that that this is very much a work in progress.

One nice feature of RESTEasy is its support for URI Templates. The URI Template spec defines a means of embedding variables in the URI. So the following URI Template:

http://somehost/contacts/{contactId}

Could return an XML document for a contact where the contactId=234:

http://somehost/contacts/234

In this example, we might be executing the following Java method:

@HttpMethod(”GET”)
public Contact getContactById(@URLParam(”contactId”) Long contactId) {
[...]

For the past few months, I have been mucking around with an idea for a RESTful Web Services framework I call RESTEasy. The project was inspired by the JAX-WS API and some of the work done by the WADL project. Yesterday, I noticed this post on Marc Hadley’s Blog regarding JSR-311. I thought I’d [...]