RESTfull Web Service with Embedded Jetty

REST is an architectural style that used to write a web service in a certain way. It is based on web-standards and the HTTP protocol. This style was defined by Roy Fielding in 2000. 

In REST architecture the main concept is the Resource which can be uniquely identified by an Uniform Resource Identifier or URI. Every resource supports the HTTP operations.

In this post I'm going to describe how to implement a RESTfull web service which I am going to create as a standalone service with an embedded Jetty server. So you do not need to deploy it in a web container.

This is a simple web service to store and retrieve music track details.

Here is the pom.xml file which contains the relevant dependencies. You can see how the embedded Jetty server is configured through the maven-jetty-plugin and the port being set to 9090.

 


    4.0.0

    com.wso2.training.manorama
    RESTfulWS
    war
    1.0-SNAPSHOT
    RESTfulWS

    
        
            com.sun.jersey
            jersey-server
            1.18
        
        
            com.sun.jersey
            jersey-servlet
            1.18
        
        
            com.sun.jersey
            jersey-core
            1.18
        
        
            com.sun.jersey
            jersey-client
            1.18
        
        
            com.sun.jersey
            jersey-json
            1.18
        
        
            asm
            asm-all
            3.1
        
        
            javax.ws.rs
            jsr311-api
            1.1.1
        
        
            junit
            junit
            4.9
            test
        
    

    
        
            
                org.apache.maven.plugins
                maven-compiler-plugin
                2.5.1
                true
                
                    1.7
                    1.7
                
            
            
                org.mortbay.jetty
                maven-jetty-plugin
                6.1.22
                
                    
                        
                            9090
                            60000
                        
                    
                
            
        
    

    
        2.13
        UTF-8
    

This web service accepts requests in JSON format and responds with the same format.

Here is the data model Track.java

package com.wso2.training.manorama.model;

/**
 * Created with IntelliJ IDEA.
 * User: manorama
 * Date: 12/4/14
 * Time: 10:24 PM
 * To change this template use File | Settings | File Templates.
 */
public class Track {

    String title;
    String singer;

    public String getTitle() {
        return title;
    }

    public void setTitle(String title) {
        this.title = title;
    }

    public String getSinger() {
        return singer;
    }

    public void setSinger(String singer) {
        this.singer = singer;
    }

    @Override
    public String toString() {
        return "Track [title=" + title + ", singer=" + singer + "]";
    }

}

Now I will describe you how to implement the RESTfull web service for this. Here is the web service implementation class.

package com.wso2.training.manorama;

import com.wso2.training.manorama.model.Track;

import javax.ws.rs.*;
import javax.ws.rs.core.MediaType;
import javax.ws.rs.core.Response;

/**
 * Created with IntelliJ IDEA.
 * User: manorama
 * Date: 12/4/14
 * Time: 10:23 PM
 * To change this template use File | Settings | File Templates.
 */
@Path("/musicservice")
public class JSONService {

    @GET
    @Path("/randomtracks")
    @Produces(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
    public Track getTrackInJSON() {

        // Here you can modify this code to get a random track from the available music tracks

        Track track = new Track();
        track.setTitle("Enter Sandman");
        track.setSinger("Metallica");

        return track;
    }

    @POST
    @Path("/tracks")
    @Consumes(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
    public Response createTrackInJSON(Track track) {

        String result = "Track saved : " + track;
        return Response.status(201).entity(result).build();
    }
}

To map the incoming requests, we configure the web.xml (webapp/WEB-INF/web.xml)

    
        RESTfulWS
        com.sun.jersey.spi.container.servlet.ServletContainer
        
            com.sun.jersey.config.property.packages
            com.wso2.training.manorama
        
        
            com.sun.jersey.api.json.POJOMappingFeature
            true
        
        1
    
    
        RESTfulWS
        /*
    

When looking at the web service implementation java code, you can see the GET requests with the pattern /randomtracks come to the getTrackInJSON() method. It will respond with a Track object in json format. Note the @Produces(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON) annotation.

The POST requests comes with the pattern /tracks will create a new Track object and responds with the HTTP 201 OK.The Track object should be in the json format. Note the @Consumes(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON) annotation

     com.sun.jersey.api.json.POJOMappingFeature
     true

This will map the POJO class to json. Thus the posted json string will be converted into “Track” object automatically.

To deploy this you will need several libraries to be included in the webapp/WEB-INF/lib folder

• asm-3.1.jar
• jersey-client-1.18.jar
• jersey-core-1.18.jar
• jersey-json-1.18.jar
• jersey-server-1.18.jar
• jersey-servlet-1.18.jar
• jsr311-api-1.1.1.jar 

Since this is a standalone service you do not need to deploy it in a web container. Simply run,

$ mvn jetty:run

To invoke this web service here is how to implement the client application.