Exploring Hypermedia Support in Jersey

During the last few weeks, Marc H., Paul S. and myself have been exploring some ideas to support Hypermedia in Jersey. The outcome of this investigation is an experimental implementation that is available in Jersey's trunk (module version 1.2-SNAPSHOT). Exactly what it means to support hypermedia is still an area of research, and some other implementations of JAX-RS (notably RESTfulie) have also proposed APIs for it. The REST architectural style, as defined by Roy Fielding in his thesis, is characterized by four constraints: (i) identification of resources (ii) manipulation of resources through representations (iii) self-descriptive messages and (iv) hypermedia as the engine of application state. It is constraint (iv), hypermedia as the engine of application state or HATEOAS for short, that is the least understood and the focus of our investigation.  It has been identified by other authors that there are actions that cannot be easily mapped to read or write operations on resources. These operations are inherently more complex and their details are rarely of interest to clients. In our work, we introduce the concept of action resources. An action resource is a sub-resource defined for the purpose of exposing workflow-related operations on parent resources. As sub-resources, action resources are identified by URIs that are relative to their parent. For ins...

Date: February, 09 2010
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/spericas/archive/2010/02/09/exploring-hypermedia-support-jersey

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