RESTEasy DZone articles and Beta 8
Posted by billburke on September 22, 2008
If you’re wondering why I haven’t done a signficant blog since June, wonder no more. Instead of creating content for my blog, I’ve written a couple of articles for DZone.com:
Also, today I put out RESTEasy 1.0 Beta 8. I small tiny bug was found by the community which I rolled up quick into a release. Follow the downloads link at http://jboss.org/resteasy to check it out.
Narayan said
Great articles on REST…. Finally managed to get a hang of it
Mansoor said
Great Article, very informative. The only question i have is how do you tell your rest service consumer about the contract of your rest service? In SOAP i am used to exposing the WSDL to the client and that tells them what to send and expect from my service. How do you accomplish that in rest?
Thanks
billburke said
@Mansoor
If you’re exchanging XML documents with a RESTFul service, look at the XML schema! You already know the interface (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE). There’s also WADL, but I’m not a big fan of it.
Mansoor said
Thanks for your reply Bill but i am still a little confused, probably because of my SOAP background. I know i can look at the schema but where would i find the schema? In SOAP, schema is usually embedded in the WSDL, in REST do i have to manually send the schema (through email perhaps?) to my service consumer? or it is published somewhere?
Thanks
billburke said
One obvious way is:
GET /my/resource
Accept: application/xml
You get back a document of the resource. If its well formed XML, then you’ll have a link to the schema.
Or even better, publish an HTML document at that same URL that describes how to access the service and which formats are available. A human language is always needed to document how to interact with any type of service, REST or SOAP.
Francisco Reverbel said
Great articles, Bill! I’ll recommend them to all my students.
Happy 2009,
Francisco