JAX-RS Framework

Question

I am working on an implementation of JAX-RS (Jersey). I know at least two other structures (Restlet and Apache CXF).

My question is: did anyone make any comparison between these structures, and if so, what structure would you recommend and why?

Answer 1

FWIW we use Jersey as a one filled with many functions (for example, WADL, implicit views, XML / JSON / Atom support), has a large and vibrant developer community, and has excellent spring integration .

If you use JBoss / SEAM, you may find that RESTeasy integrates a little better, but if you use Spring for Injection Dependency, then Jersey seems to be the simplest, most popular, active and functional implementation.

Answer 2

Restlet has an extensive list of extensions for Spring, WADL, XML, JSON, and many others, including an extension for the JAX-RS API.

It is also the only structure available in six consecutive versions :

• Java SE
• Java EE
• Google Web Toolkit
• Google appengine
• Android
• OSGi environments

Its main advantages:

• fully symmetric client and server APIs when JAX-RS was designed for server processing
• for protocols other than HTTP (mapping to HTTP semantics) when JAX-RS is only HTTP
• a much wider range of possibilities, including full control of URI routing through the Restlet API (but can be integrated with Servlet if necessary)
• full NIO support

The JAX-RS API may be a good choice if you are limited to JCP-approved APIs (then do not use Spring or any extension of JAX-RS projects such as Jersey and RESTeasy!), But otherwise Restlet is the most mature structure (originally released in 2005) and will give you in version 2.0 all the benefits of annotations combined with a powerful and extensible class structure.

For a longer list of features, please check this page .

Regards, Jerome Louvel

Restlet ~ Founder and Lead Developer ~ http://www.restlet.org

Answer 3

My team and I use Restlet extensively, but not JAX-RS. I can say that I was very impressed with the developers and the Restlet community; they are very active, active, active, responsive and committed to a sustainable, effective, reliable and efficient basis. I'm sorry that I cannot directly address your primary interest, but I thought you might find my experience with Restlet value.

Answer 4

My colleague mentions why we use RESTeasy for our current project in RESTful web services in Java EE with RESTeasy (JAX-RS) :

Its reference implementation, Jersey, was not selected because we had problems integrating it with EJB3 and Seam 2.0.

We use the RESTeasy JAX-RS implementation because we had no problems integrating it with our EJB and Seam. It also has ample documentation.

There is another implementation from Apache, but I have not tried it because it uses an older version of JAX-RS.

Finally, there is another infrastructure for RESTful web services for Java called Restlet, but we did not approve it because at the time of this writing, it uses a custom architecture, even if it has proper JAX-RS support.

Answer 5

There seem to be 4 decent JAX-RS implementations, so you probably agree with any of them. For what it's worth, I found Jersey (1.0.2) really enjoyable so far. My needs are a rather modest, simple service in the background, caring for plumbing and so on. And that jersey is very good.

Answer 6

I learned that Apache Wink is very easy to use, supports JAX-RS and has many features that go beyond the standard.

Answer 7

I would not use the framework. Only the one that comes with your application server. If you use the specifics of one framework, you will lose portability and you will end up in hell if the application server provider includes a different version of your favorite structure. I will stick with jax-ws.