Restful web services using jersey

Introduction

This is a tutorial explaining how to write Restful web services using Jersey on Tomcat.

What is REST

REST is a software architectural style as described by Roy Fielding in his PhD dissertation published in 2000. It stands for REpresentational State Transfer. REST by itself is not an architecture but a set of constraints that, when applied to the design of a system, creates a software architectural style.

Following constraints define a RESTful system:

• It must be a client-server system
• It has to be stateless - there should be no need for the service to keep user's sessions, in other words, each request should be independent of others.
• It has to support a caching system - the network infrastructure should support cache at different levels.
• It has to be uniformly accessible - each resource must have a unique address and a valid point of access.
• It has to layered - it must support scalability
• It should provide code on demand - although this is an optional constraint, application ban be expandable at runtime by allowing the downloading of code on demand, for example, java applets. 

More to follow soon...


Download a Jersey sample application from here

Sample application is an employee service spitting data in xml and html formats
download zip file and import in eclipse ide.
run Main.java, you won't need a server for this, just run it as a java application.

On your favorite browser try following urls:

http://localhost:8080/emp/