JAX-RS: The Java API for RESTful Web Services
Introduction
JAX-RS (JSR 311), the Java API for RESTful web services, has had a profound effect on the architecture and design of web services. It was inspired by Roy Thomas Fielding’s dissertation on the “Design of Network-based Software Architectures‘, in which he introduced the REST (Representational State Transfer) concept.
This introductory article to JAX-RS reviews two popular JAX-RS frameworks, Jersey and Apache CXF, and provides some basic examples that illustrate how to build, deploy, and execute RESTful web services. Before diving into the formal definition of REST, let’s walk through the basic concepts required to understand REST.
You also should review Java annotations (part of JDK 1.4) and the Maven configuration and build tool, if you are not familiar with them already.
