(this post was stuck in the "draft" category and should have been out a few days ago, sorry about that)

The 0.7 version of Jersey, the JAX-RS reference implementation is out and it is a good illustration of community development. Of course it aligns with the current state of the specification but it also shows interesting work with JavaRebel, Spring and IoC's, Grizzly, Grizzly Comet, JavaRebel and has improved JSON support. Who said Reference Implementations were useless proof of concepts?

MuleSource has released a RESTpack for integrating RESTful (duh!) Services through the Mule ESB... and they are including Jersey. Check out the RESTpack announcement.

And, on a related announcement, Marc mentions that there are 3 Implementations of JAX-RS, which is very nice adoption at this stage of the Spec. Of course, we like Jersey the best :-)

More news on the Hudson Dashboard for GlassFish Builds. JAX-RS (JSR 311) and its Jersey Reference Implementation have long started agile iterative development and it only makes a lot of sense to now have them use Hudson as a continuous build system.

In fact, the team has been using Hudson for a little while and all is accessible outside Sun:
• Jersey trunk build with findbugs
• Jersey Unit testing with Emma

If you're curious, Jersey takes about one minute to build. glassfishbuildtools.sun.com also hosts GlassFish v3 and Hudson builds.

Paul Sandoz is reporting on the release of JAX-RS v0.6, the JSR for RESTful Web Services. As always, the specification and Reference Implementation (Jersey) are moving along quite nicely as well as in parallel. The editors draft is available here and the schedule has been updated to have a final release in September (see also this wiki page).

Among the new things in v0.6, you'll find the Jersey client API, enhanced JSON suport, and better integration of Jersey with IoC containers. For more details on the contents and the future developments, please read this blog entry. Keep the feedback coming - good or not so good, we take both.

JSON (JSON@TA) is a key component in Ajax and a REST framework like Jersey needs to support it well to be successful. Jakub reports on a new simpler default JSON data format in the latest Jersey; check his Description of Features and then see its use in jMaki Widgets. Check it out and let Jakub, Paul and Marc know how it works for you.

Jersey's latest release is 0.6ea and is available from the Jersey Downloads Page. The latest stable release is 0.5ea and is also available through the Update Center. Jersey 0.6ea will be pushed to the UC in about 10 days.

One of the beauties of Open Source is that it encourages collaboration (and sometimes healthy competition) across projects. I notice two sets of recent links from two Java.Net projects to Apache Abdera. Dave has an overview of Apache Adbera and then Rome and Rome Propono, later he pointed out the recent Abdera Refactoring. Check out the (nice!) tone of the comments to these entries.

On a separate theme, Marc and Paul have been playing with Abdera and Jersey in a project. See first Marc's Note and then look at Paul's. Nice to see the exchanges; I'm sure all these projects will benefit from exchanges thoughts and ideas.

Jersey v0.5 is now on the GlassFish Update Center, courtesy of Jakub. Get it using the INSTALL/updatecenter/bin/updatetool binary.

The other news in the JAX-RS world is Paul's blog entry on the client API for Jersey. While a REST API on the server side isn't really needed, having one to write clients in Java (not JavaScript) does make a lot of sense (URLConnection, HTTPClient anyone?). This client API uses the builder pattern and allows for filters and asynchrony. This client API is work in progress and targets Jersey v0.6.

The latest episode of the GlassFish Podcast was briefly pushed out last week but feedburner couldn't pick up the audio enclosure. All is now fixed and live. You can get the content here or from iTunes (search for "GlassFish"). This is good timing given the recent 0.5 release of Jersey (although the interview doesn't get into specifics of that interim release) and the associated NetBeans support. The GlassFish Update Center doesn't have the Jersey 0.5 bits available just yet, but I'm told this should happen in the next few days.

This podcast's mp3 files are now served by GlassFish and the application isn't (all) Java. Read all about it on Igor's blog.

Paul is announcing the availability of JAX-RS v0.5. As with previous releases, this one is synchronized with Jersey v0.5, its Reference Implementation. Traditional delivery vehicles such a the GlassFish Update Center and NetBeans will soon follow (Maven should be already there). Among new things, Jersey has an improved deployment and configuration process (courtesy of Grizzly and asm) and a rewritten URI dispatching architecture. Paul has more details in his blog entry.

Both the JSR and the reference implementation are developed in a very collaborative way. Schedule leading up to version 1.0 is here.

Heard in blogosphere ...

NetBeans 6 + JSR 311 RESTful Web services plugin + GlassFish v2 UR1 with Jersey + JPA Unit + JSP/Servlet for GUI administering + RESTful Web services generated from Entity classes replaced Ruby 1.8.6 + Rails 2.0 + Mongrel 1.1.1 for a RESTful toolkit.

WADL (TA entries) can be used in different ways in conjunction with REST services. The Original Presentations already described its use to help write clients/servers but later work has explored automatic generation of WADL from existing services (e.g. from Message Traces).

The latest Jersey has recently improved on a variant of this approach where the runtime dynamically generates WADL to represent an endpoint - see Marc and Paul. As they put it, this lets you "Waddle through the service". Seems an interesting approach.

BTW - Jersey is done in coordination with the Metro work and the Metro Roadmap shows the Jersey 1.0 fully integrated with Metro 2.1 late next year.

JAX-RS (JSR 311) and its Jersey reference implementation have been moving along simultaneously in a very open fashion. As a matter of fact, several editors drafts have previously been made available on http://jsr311.dev.java.net. It's now time for the JCP Early Draft Review. Comments are due in the next three weeks.

If you are new to JAX-RS, this is all about exposing POJOs (obviously) as resources accessible via URIs and the HTTP protocol. This work focuses on the server-side, leaving client technologies such as jMaki or any other HTTP-enabled client technology do the fetching and presentation part.

Paul has announced the Jersey 0.4 release which tracks the latest API and Spec (also see changes). The Jersey team has quite a bit cooking for 0.5 (late December or January) including a new automaton-based URI-pattern matching algorithm, new entity providers, new simplified on-the-fly compilations, and more. It looks 0.5 will be a very interesting release.

It is also nice to see references to contributions not just from Sun folks like Marc, Jakub and Paul but also significant contributions from Florian and Frank. Check Paul's writeup for more details.

While standarda such as SAML and XACML provide flexible, interoperable frameworks for exchanging authentication and authorization data, developers are sometimes left wanting something simpler - "Just give me an easy way to authenticate a user and check if they are authorized to access a resource".

We've been working on this in OpenSSO these past few months, building a simple set of identity services; web services for authentication, authorization, attribute retrieval and logging. With SOAP and REST endpoints, just about any application can manipulate identities in a very simple, robust way. Check out Aravindan and Marina's recent article on authentication with identity services. Subscribe to the Sun Developer Network identity feed to catch further article in this series.

The Early Draft Review Specification for JSR-311 is now available for Download. This review closes on 23 November 2007. The Expert Group site is jsr311@Java.Net and the implementation is at Jersey. Feedback is encouraged.