GxRest
The gCube eXtensions to the Rest Protocol (gxRest) is a Java library designed to provide convenient round-trip interaction between a Restful web application and its clients.
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 avoid that each service implements its own conventions over the returned responses;
- 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, headers and streams.
Correlation with the JAX-RS runtime
The approach is independent from the JAX-RS implementation used to develop the web application, being entirely based on the javax.ws.rs
package. However, some features rely 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. You must explicitly add Jersey or another JAR-RS implementation to your classpath.
At request side, a JAX-RS runtime 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>