RESTful Java with JAX-RS

Preface

Author’s Note

The bulk of my career has been spent working with and implementing distributed middleware. In the mid-’90s I worked for the parent company of Open Environment Corporation, working on DCE tools. Later on, I worked for Iona, developing their next-generation CORBA ORB. Currently, I work for the JBoss division of Red Hat, which is entrenched in Java middleware, specifically Java EE. So, you could say that I have a pretty rich perspective when it comes to middleware.

I must tell you that I was originally very skeptical of REST as a way of writing SOA applications. It seemed way too simple and shortsighted, so I sort of blew it off for a while. One day though, back in mid-2007, I ran into my old Iona boss and mentor Steve Vinoski while grabbing a sandwich at D’Angelo in Westford, MA near Red Hat’s offices. We ended up sitting down, having lunch, and talking for hours. The first shocker for me was that Steve had left Iona to go work for a start-up. The second was when he said, “Bill, I’ve abandoned CORBA and WS-* for REST.” For those of you who don’t know Steve, he contributed heavily to the CORBA specification, wrote a book on the subject (which is basically the CORBA bible), and is a giant in the distributed computing field, writing regularly for C++ Report and IEEE. How could the guy I looked up to and was responsible for my foundation in distributed computing abandon CORBA, WS-*, and the distributed framework landscape he was instrumental in creating? I felt a little ...