Customer Reviews

RESTful Java with Jax-RS (Animal Guide)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a good book to get a novice like me up and running pretty quickly with RESTful web services. There is light coverage of the JSR-311 specification, which is both good and bad. When you're a busy practioner, you don't have time to read a 1,000+ page book on abstract concepts, but I believe the author could have spent more than one chapter on covering concepts.

The book is full of examples, which is great to develop a web service quickly, but the author often did not explain why he chose to develop his services one way versus another. This lack of an explanation can leave a developer guessing when he has a real-world issue to deal with that is slightly different from the examples.

The biggest drawback to the book is all of the typos. It really bothers me when I'm trying to understand new concepts, and the reference material that I'm using has significant typos. I hope that the author will correct those for the next release of the book.

Having written all of that, this book is probably the best (maybe only) book in the market right now that explains the REST from a Java perspective.

No one really enjoys reading specs, particularly not JSRs (Java Specification Requests, for those of you who are lucky enough not to have encountered these fun-filled documents). For those of you doing Java web development and looking for a good way to build RESTful applications, this might have been a sore spot when trying to understand JAX-RS -- the Java specification that outlines an API for building REST apps using annotations.

While both Jersey and RESTeasy, two popular implementations of JAX-RS, do provide fairly helpful user guides, the specification provides a wide-ranging set of capabilities and neither sufficiently conveyed the breadth of these, in my opinion. But now there is a new resource in the form of Bill Burke's RESTful Java with JAX-RS. Bill is the creator of JBoss' RESTeasy framework so he knows the specification well and it shows in this book.

The book explores building a RESTful web app from the ground up and includes a full workbook in the second section with complete examples. The examples are included with the download of RESTeasy, which was not immediately obvious on my first read through. Each chapter of the workbook matches a chapter from earlier in the book giving the reader the opportunity to try out the ideas they've just read about. This feels like a good format for a book like this -- a motivated reader can charge through the content of the book to get a cohesive view of the API, while not getting too bogged down in the details of setting up each example.

Some of the most interesting material that's harder to get from the users guides and online tutorials is covered in the material on content negotiation in chapter eight and content marshalling in chapter six. The content marshalling chapter not only explains the built in marshalling capabilities and the use of JAXB but also details how to add in custom handlers. While I don't know how much this will get used in practice given the ubiquity of JSON and XML, I suspect for those few who really need to supply their own data formats or who want to replace the built-in handlers will be more than happy to see it covered here.

I have to say that I felt like some items were not covered which would have been useful. For instance, I would love to see some examples of integrating with existing web apps and frameworks. It's not immediately clear what the best route is here and searching online turns up few, if any, best practices or war stories. Similarly it seems that a section on testing REST-based applications would have been called for, even if it isn't strictly part of the specification. I guess the book tries to stick to outlining JAX-RS within the context of the spec, but this feels to me a bit too limiting in scope. In general, some guidelines on best practices, common integration and usage scenarios and other "real world" content would have been a welcome addition.

Despite these minor complaints, this book is clearly a must have if you're venturing down the path of RESTful Java development. The existing documentation is far too-limited and this book is an easy and even enjoyable read.

If you are a Java developer with some Web and/or Web service experience, this book will be very easy to read, whether you are new to REST, have done REST with a different framework/API (e.g. plain Java servlet), or have done some JAX-RS before but want to have a thorough understanding of the JAX-RS API.

You can skip chapter 1 if you want see JAX-RS in action, and go straight to chapters 2, 3, 4 and 6, as I did.

The JAX-RS spec is very well covered in this book. Ideally, I would like to see the REST Client API from Jersey covered as well (in addition to that of RESTEasy).

Original review written by Gianfranco Tognana, JUG Lugano, www.juglugano.ch


This book is a fresh rediscovery of http and the web

The introductory chapter gives an overview of what REST is, and how JAX-RS specifications address this philosophy.

Each chapter describes part of JAX-RS accurately and clearly and the snippets of code presented are properly explained.
The last chapters present the integration with the most popular JEE frameworks: EJB and Spring and a really helpful explanation about the available tools to perform test of Restful applications

For each chapter of theory, in the second part of the book, a workbook, there is a chapter with examples. Such organization allows you to get an overview of the API without having to constantly jump pages containing examples and yet is simple to move from theory to practice going to the matching section of the workbook.

Following the directions of the workbook, you can easily download the source code which contains plenty of well documented examples.

The only fact to be moved is the explicit statement that the code as presented should not be used in production (not for copyright issues): a novice can only imagine what its limits are but without having an alternative.

It is well written, focused on the subject and easily understood.

This book is an excellent tutorial and a quick reference.

The book starts out with a basic introduction to RESTful web services. I didn't need it, and if you are a REST novice I suggest you pick up Restful Web Services first, as you will be missing many crucial insights without it.

The book then covers the complete JAX-RS standard, while keeping the language straightforward so that everyone can understand it. There is plenty of code to learn from and as in his EJB book, the author have devoted the last half of the book to full working examples. These are build with Maven (so they can work in any Java IDE) and covers a multitude of subjects, including Spring/EJB integration and unit testing with embedded Jetty.

Bill obviously knows his business (even if he admits to being a long standing Corba fanboy) and overall I find the book to be concise, detailed, and well written. However it only gets 4 stars as some of the subjects seams a little rushed (such as JAXB integration and its REST introduction).

There is definately some good information in the book. However, most of the examples don't show the return statement. Maybe its just me but I always want to see what is returned. I'll probably exchange it for something else.

From a practical standpoint, I found this book to be excellent. From writing basic services to adding content handlers, adding exception mappers, content negotiation, Security, HATEOS, it's all here in one place in the first part of the book. This book also compares different JAX-RS implementations including Jersey, CXF and RESTEasy. Part II of this book explains the example source code and also has instructions on how to run it. I have tested all examples in this book with the exception of the last chapter that deals with EJB and JPA integration and they work flawlessly. The code samples are organized very well and come with maven integration which is nice.

If you are new to REST, start with RESTful web services and then move on to this book. Since the author is part of the team that created RESTEasy, all source code examples use RESTEasy. I can certainly understand if other folks would like to have seen examples tailored towards Jersey (Sun's reference implementation) but I don't consider this to be a big drawback in any case since both frameworks are JAX-RS compliant, so moving from one to other shouldn't be too hard (with some caveats such as you will lose some of the features that are supported only by a given implementation such as @Formatted annotation by RESTEasy).

This is a very well written book. Highly recommended.

I really liked this book. It was clear and focused. I experimented
with JAX-RX/Jersey several months ago - and I can say that I wished
I had this book at that time! If you are trying to understand jax-rs
from a pragmatic viewpoint I think starting with this book is well worth
the time and money. If you are new to web services and want a more general
introduction to web services and REST then pick up the "Restful Web Services" book
by Ruby/Richardson - maybe read both of these books together if you're really into
it.

Good cookbook for RESTful Web Services with good examples.
Only small corrections of code are necessary.Restful Java with Jax-RS (Animal Guide)