GxRest

The gCube eXtensions to the Rest Protocol library (gxRest) provides a convenient round-trip interaction between a Restful web application and its client. The approach is completely independent from the JAX-RS implementation used to develop the web application, being entirely based on the javax.ws.rs package.

The library is consistently divided in:

• context-aware requests sent from a client to a web application
• outbound status-aware responses returned from a web application
• inbound responses received by a client.

Besides achieving independence over the web framework, the prominent features of the library are:

• to guarantee the correctness of requests/responses across the D4Science infrastructure;
• to abstract over the HTTP-based details required by the gCube framework when invoking a remote service;
• to return error responses at the familiar (for any Java programmer) level of exceptions and error codes, while web frameworks usually just let return an HTTP status.

Correlation with the JAX-RS runtime

As mentioned, gxRest is generic but it relies on a JAX-RS runtime implementation. It dynamically loads the implementation available on the classpath and uses it for modeling and sending the responses and requests. The reference implementation for JAX-RS is named Jersey, but it is not included in Java SE. If you want to use this request you must explicitly add a JAR-RS implementation to your classpath.

At request side, a JAX-RS rutin is not strictly required as one of the requests implementation builds atop of plain HTTP protocol.

Distribution

gxRest is available as Maven artifact and can be added to a project with the following coordinates:

<dependency>
	<groupId>org.gcube.common</groupId>
	<artifactId>gxRest</artifactId>
	<version>0.0.2-SNAPSHOT</version>
</dependency>