Is it possible to use JAX-RS as a web framework?

Question

I've been looking into JAX-RS lately because I really like the Java platform and a RESTful style of web development. I've read a lot about using JAX-RS for creating RESTful Web Services, but is it possible to use JAX-RS to create RESTful web sites? I guess more specifically, is it possible to use JAX-RS as a controller (to retrieve required data from the server) and then forward control to a view engine to render the appropriate HTML?

I've been googling around but haven't found any resources that show you how to do this.

Thanks for any insight/help.

Answer 1

I think you are having difficulty with your google searches because not many people are doing this. JAX-RS was designed for web services, so developers don't think of using it as a controller for web applications. However, there is no reason it wouldn't work.

Check out this blog post: JAX-RS as the one Java web framework to rule them all?

I think its exactly the kind of thing you are looking for.

Answer 2

dbyrne is right that almost no one is doing this. It's more conventional to use JAX-RS to dump information to JSON or XML. Then you fancy up the web browser with an RIA framework (e.g. Ext JS), which handles manipulating the DOM and injecting data as its fetched in JSON/XML form. This approach is powerful. You can write multiple, possibly non-browser clients for the service, all parsing the same JSON/XML. You can write "one-page" webapps, where all information exchange happens through AJAX after the initial pageload. I urge you to investigate and consider its strengths and weaknesses in the context of your particular problem.

Returning to your question: the answer is "sort of". This functionality is not directly provided by the JAX-RS spec (as of 1.1). However, it is in the JAX-RS reference implementation, Jersey, through the Viewable response object. See this blog post if you want to investigate further: http://blogs.sun.com/sandoz/entry/mvcj. I want to point out that I have no experience with this side of Jersey. It has been pleasant to write XML/JSON-returning web services with Jersey, but I can't speak to this server-side HTML templating business.

Edit: dbyrne's edited his answer to include a blog post which points to the one mentioned above. I think we've both converged on approximately the same answer.

Answer 3

If you truly want to rely just only JAX-RS for your web framework, Jersey might be your best bet. Keep in mind the features you get from it are going to be bare minimum and you are obviously not going to get all the bells and whistles like what's provided by JSF, Wicket, etc.

If you know your web application is going to rely on Spring, perhaps you should consider using Spring MVC 3.0. It provides restful web services-alike and it gives you better features so that you don't need to implement most of them yourself. Granted, Spring MVC 3.0 is not an implementation of JAX-RS and based on what the Spring developer said, it seems like they will never make Spring MVC as an implementation of JAX-RS since they are already quite a few stable implementations out there. However, the syntax is pretty similar in my opinion, or at least I was able to understand them rather quickly even though I have been using Jersey for quite awhile.