Implementation of JAX-RS 2.0 web applications
You can use Java™ API for RESTful Web Services (JAX-RS) to develop services that follow Representational State Transfer (REST) principles. Using JAX-RS, development of RESTful services is simplified.
While JAX-RS provides a faster way of developing web applications than servlets, the primary goal
of JAX-RS is to build RESTful services. A server-side component API is defined in
jaxrs-1.1 and jaxrs-2.0 to build REST applications. IBM® JAX-RS provides an implementation of the JAX-RS (JSR 311)
specification.
jaxrs-2.0 supports JavaSE 1.7 only. If you run Liberty with the jaxrs-2.0
feature on JavaSE 1.6, Liberty reports the
following exception and jaxrs-2.0 feature cannot start with Liberty:
[ERROR] CWWKF0032E: The jaxrs-2.0 feature requires a minimum Java runtime environment version of JavaSE 1.7.By using the principles of REST, your business applications can benefit from several advantages. RESTful services are simpler to develop and use. Most RESTful services use well-defined standards for delivery such as HTTP. Because HTTP is a protocol that has RESTful properties, RESTful services gain scalability advantages that enable the service to serve different clients and interoperate with multiple services, while allowing for future growth. Additionally, clients for RESTful services generally are not difficult to develop, yielding interoperability advantages because most RESTful services use common data representations such as XML and JSON.
By using JAX-RS technology, REST applications are simpler to develop, simpler to use, and simpler to scale when compared to other types of distributed systems. Many popular and widely used Internet services are successfully providing RESTful APIs to their applications. Third parties use various REST APIs to build their own businesses and applications.
JAX-RS capabilities are provided by the use of a servlet or a filter. To make your business application ready to use JAX-RS capabilities, configure the web.xml file of your web application and assemble the IBM JAX-RS implementation that is based on the Apache Wink framework into the library directory of your web application.