Building RESTful Web Services

Abstract

The Java EE 6 platform introduced the Java API for RESTful Web Services (JAX-RS), enabling developers to easily develop powerful web services. RESTful web services are those that support the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style, which is an architecture for producing web services that focus on a system’s resources, specifically on how states are transferred over HTTP. JAX-RS web services are stateless, and they utilize HTTP methods explicitly by mapping methods of web service classes to HTTP protocols (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) via annotations. A RESTful web service provides custom URIs for access to web service resources, allowing web service methods to be invoked and passing zero or more parameters via a simple URI call from a web service client. RESTful web services can send responses that are in XML, JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), or other formats. The JAX-RS stack provides an annotation-rich architecture for designing web services, which makes it much easier for developers to produce powerful web services without XML configuration.