Java Web Services: Up and Running, 2nd Edition

A RESTful Web Service as Restlet Resources

The Restlet web framework supports RESTful web services, and the API is similar to JAX-RS; indeed, a Restlet application can use JAX-RS annotations such as @Produces instead of or in addition to Restlet annotations. This section adapts the earlier JAX-RS adages service to a Restlet implementation, which is published both with a web server and with a standalone Java application. The revised service, adages2, implements the four CRUD operations.

Downloading and Using the Restlet Framework

The Restlet JAR files are available for free to download. The current version is 2.x. There are editions for core and enterprise Java together with tutorials, documentation, and examples. Restlet, like JAX-RS, provides HTTP-method annotations for resources. Restlet has a client-side and a service-side API. A Restlet resource published under Tomcat or Jetty can be published, with little change, using a standard command-line application and a single Restlet JAR file. The framework does a first-rate job of decoupling the service-as-a-resource from its publication.

The Restlet framework includes JAR files to interoperate with other popular Java frameworks such as Spring and the Google Web Toolkit. Restlet even supports, through an extension, JAX-RS annotations such as @POST and @Produces. There are libraries for Apache’s Velocity templating engine, email, SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), OAuth, and various other technologies. Anyone versatile in either JAX-RS or Restlet ...