Jersey JAX-RS on Glassfish 3.0.1: Can I have an empty webapp element in my web.xml?

Question

My understanding is that glassfish 3 is JEE6 compliant and jax-rs-aware, and that consequently I do not have to include the jersey servlet container and mapping in my web.xml file. Here's what I was hoping my web.xml could look like

<webapp>
</webapp>

That doesn't work though, as I get 404's when I try to hit my jax-rs path-anotated resources. It works great when I include the servlet adaptor, like this:

<webapp>
  <servlet>
    <servlet-name>ServletAdaptor</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>com.sun.jersey.spi.container.servlet.ServletContainer</servle
    <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
  </servlet>
  <servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>ServletAdaptor</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
  </servlet-mapping>
</webapp>

Is it possible to have an empty webapp element using jersey on glassfish 3.0.1?

Answer 1

Processing of web-fragment.xml files is probably only supported when you declare the correct version in your web.xml. This way the behaviour of existing applications don't suddenly change when deployed to a new version of an application server.

Please try it with a web.xml like this, which is copied from a newly created ee6 web project in Netbeans.

<web-app version="3.0"
         xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
         xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
         xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_3_0.xsd"&gt;
</web-app>

Answer 2

For Java EE 6 compliant JAX-RS implementations, I think you need to do the following:

1) Add a javax.ws.rs.core.Application sub-class to your web project 2) Then, add a @javax.ws.rs.ApplicationPath("/*") annotation to the Application sub-class.

Your Application sub-class shouldn't have to do anything. By the spec this implies that any @Path/@Provider found in the app will be included in the application and then your @ApplicationPath is like your servlet mapping. This will let you have an empty web.xml.

The issue with having no web.xml is that a JAX-RS implementation will not know which servlet mapping (url pattern) to use. Also, this allows you to have only certain resources/providers available for a particular URL pattern if you wish to return only a subset of @Path/@Provider annotated classes in your Application.getClasses().