Earthly Powers

On Web resource mapping with JAX-RS

Bill de hÓra has a great blog entry on web resource mapping criteria for evaluating Web frameworks.

In the current JAX-RS API it is easy to do "function passing" or "surrogate". So following Bill's example...

The following is a resource using  the "function passing" approach:

@UriTemplate("document/xyz") 
public class FunctionPassingResource {
    @HttpMethod
    public InputStream getDocumentOrEditForm(@QueryParam("f") String f) {
        if (f.equals("edit)) {
            // return edit form representation
            ...
        } else {
            // return document representation
            ...
        }
    }
} 

The following is a resource using  the "surrogate" approach:

@UriTemplate("document/xyz") 
public class FunctionPassingResource {
    @HttpMethod
    public InputStream getDocument() {
        // return document representation
    }

    @UriTemplate("edit")
    @HttpMethod
    public InputStream getEditForm() {
        // return edit form representation
    }
}

IMHO JAX-RS is more suited to the "surrogate" approach. This approach is also used in the Atom server example of Jersey to distinguish between read only and read/write URIs of Atom entries. See the break down of the URIs here.

Posted at 09:15PM Aug 14, 2007 by Paul Sandoz in REST  |  Comments[0]