Pushing Jersey to the limit

I wanted to describe an interesting problem I recently faced that involved the most excellent JAX-RS specification and its Jersey implementation.  The quick overview is that we wanted the output of our JAX-RS resource classes to be client-agnostic, but we also wanted the ability to insert a decorator of sorts in between the objects we were returning and the normal JAX-RS serialization/writing process, all without relying on any vendor-supplied extensions.  This turned out to push the capabilities of the JAX-RS specification quite hard, and I thought the experience was worth writing up.  Thanks to Paul Sandoz and Marc Hadley for making appropriate noises along the way. The Client Many of you may be familiar with SmartGWT.  This is a truly wonderful AJAX toolkit that provides a GWT wrapper around a robust, battle-hardened Javascript library called SmartClient.  One of its many strengths is its comprehensive support for data binding by way of DataSources. One such DataSource is the RestDataSource, which is an extremely convenient way to talk to a preexisting back end service.  Its convenience comes at a minor price: to the extent that you use it out of the box, you are bound by its request and response formats.  These are not onerous formats to support, but they do smell like SmartClient, and to the extent you want to not couple your stuff to a given vendor's requirements you might not want...

Date: April, 28 2010
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/ljnelson/archive/2010/04/28/pushing-jersey-limit

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