Restlet vs Spring MVC for Restful web service

Question

I'm researching how best to create a Restful web service on Google app engine. My end goal is to have an Android application call a web service on GAE to post and get data. At this point I not sure what the best approach is.

What I know at this point is Spring MVC 3 provide the ability to create web service but it does not provide a full implementation of JAX-RS. I also have read a few blog that talk about how Spring and Restlet can be integrated together. On the other side I have read that I could only use Restlet in GAE. I would also like provide a light web interface for users to view their posted data

So my questions are the following. 1. Should I just use Restlet. 2. Should I just use Spring MVC to provide my Restful web service. 3. Should I use Spring and Restlet together.

At this point I think I should invest my time in Restlet because that seems to be the best approach for calling web services in Android. I'm also debating if Spring MVC is just over kill.

Any thoughts would be helpful.

Answer 1

I don't have experience with Restlet but Spring MVC 3.0 is quite powerful for building restful webservice AND webapps. So if you also plan for your service to be accessible through browsers then it is a great solution since your controllers can serve both apps and browsers.

Perhaps this is also possible with Restlet but I have not heard of its capabilities for building webapps.

Just beware that Spring has a high loading time. This means that you have to be careful to avoid slow responses from cold starts.

Answer 2

Have a look at the following similar questions: Easiest frameworks to implement Java REST web services and Can anyone recommend a Java web framework that is based on MVC and supports REST?

Answer 3

I recently set up RESTlet on GAE and it was an absolute breeze! There are docs outlining the procedure on the RESTlet website and I was up and running RESTlet on GAE using the Google datastore within two hours.

The major downside is that performance of the Google data store for low volume apps is atrocious. Timeouts are not uncommon. (Google mandates a maximum 30 second request time and your app can easily take up half of that in coming out of hibernation if it hasn't been accessed recently)

Right now I am building another RESTful app and chose to go the Spring 3 MVC / Hibernate / MYSQL route. I am not new to Spring DI or MySQL, but I am new to Spring MVC and it is taking me days to work through all the issues I am encountering. I am disappointed in the quality of available documentation and I have not been able to find a reasonable and complete Spring 3 MVC RESTful CRUD tutorial anywhere. Argh.