RESTful Web Services with JAX-RS

Until recently, REST as an architectural style has suffered from a lack of understanding and serious lack of frameworks. Now that APIs and frameworks like JAX-RS and Jersey are here, why should you take the time to learn how to build RESTful services?

Applying REST to your web services asks you to give up some very familiar and comfortable tools (session data, distributed transactions across services, etc.) and it may not be clear what you gain. This talk will explain why you can do more (composable services, flexible interactions, simplified caching, easier testing) with less (stateless interaction with the client, no distributed transactions, no servlets, optionally no container, etc.). Jersey, the JAX-RS reference implementation) is a great tool for building RESTful services and we'll use that to drive the discussion.

Not only will we discuss REST design, we'll explore a working example with a sample RESTful service built using Jersey. We'll look at the nuts and bolts of building JAX-RS based services and even delve into topics like resource-independent caching. And we'll look at the limitations of REST and JAX-RS to understand when it does and does not make sense to use it.

About Brian Gilstrap

Brian Gilstrap is a Principal Software Engineer at Object Computing, Inc. where he has spent the last eleven of his 20+ years in the industry. In those years, he has worked with many languages and many technologies. He writes and blogs frequently, and has been on the steering committee of the St. Louis Java User's Group more than a decade. With OCI he provides consulting to companies in many industries and countries, and develops & delivers training courses for Washington University's Center for Applied Information Technology.

Brian has a passion for building software that is easy to use and robust while still meeting the rapid development requirements in today's industry. He has expertise in distributed systems, object oriented analysis and design, secure computing, and many languages and frameworks.

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