Complete Hibernate – Beta Class at Reduced Price

Intertech has updated its Complete Hibernate class (more material – more days of training) and it is being run for the first time in August. Sign up now to get a 25% reduction in price by participating in the beta run of the class.

JAX-WS and Operation Overloading

Another great group of people this week in my classroom. The topic was Java Web Services with a little JMS thrown in. During the class this week, in the discussion of Java to XML (and back) mapping as provided by JAX-WS and JAXB, I indicated to students that while Java as a programming language supports method (or operation) overloading, it is prohitited in Web services by specification (WSDL) and the WS-I Basic Profile.

During class, we explored the JAX-WS annotations for defining Java Web services. Specifically, we looked at the @WebService annotation on the service endpoint interface (SEI) and implementation bean (SIB) as shown below.

package example;
import
javax.jws.WebService;
@WebService(endpointInterface ="example.SomeService")
public class SomeServiceImpl implements SomeService
{
public int doIt(String str) {
return 0;
}
}

package example;
import
javax.jws.WebService;
@WebService
public interface SomeService {
public
int doIt(String str);
}

When looking at JAX-WS, we also explored the operationName attribute on the @WebMethod annotation for Web service methods. A perceptive and imaginative student (thanks Pat) asked “if you could use the operationName to allow for method overloading at the Java level while preserving unique operation names in the WSDL and SOAP level?” I’ve extended the example to demonstrate below.

package example;

import javax.jws.WebMethod;
import javax.jws.WebService;

@WebService
public interface SomeService {

public int doIt(String str);
@WebMethod(operationName = "doItNow")
public int doIt(int i);
}

package example;
import javax.jws.WebService;
@WebService(endpointInterface = "example.SomeService")
public class SomeServiceImpl implements SomeService {
public int doIt(String str) {
return 0;
}
public int doIt(int i) {
return 0;
}
}

What a great question and one that sent me scrambling to my browser and text books looking for an answer.

The answer is – no, not easily. This will be somewhat dependent on the JAX-WS implementation (for example, take a look at Christophe Hamerling’s example in Apache CXF where overloaded operations and use of the @operationName works) and work-arounds could probably be negotiated (for example, don’t use document/literal wrapped style). However, when using the JAX-WS reference implementation mapping tools there is still going to be problems despite the @WebMethods operationName attribute provides a unique operation name as far as SOAP and WSDL are concerned.

The reason? The wsgen tool has problems creating the default SOAP wrapper classes for the operation inputs and outputs. When you run wsgen with the code above, you get an exception (com.sun.tools.internal.ws.processor.modeler.ModelerException: [failed to localize] Request wrapper bean names must be unique and must not clash with other generated classes.)as shown below.

So thanks again for the great question Pat. Contact Intertech if you would like to sign up for our next Complete Java Web Services class.

JAX-RS: A new Java Web service API

JAX-RS will be part of Java EE 6 which is due out in final form in September ’09. What is JAX-RS? JAX-RS is the Java API for RESTful Web Services. OK, so what is a RESTful Web service? The term REST (Representation State Transfer) dates to a 2000 doctoral dissertation by Roy Fielding – cofounder of the Apache HTTP server and coauthor of the HTTP and URI standards. REST is the software architecture (or architectural style) for distributed hypermedia (text, graphics, audio, video, etc.) systems. REST is the foundation of the World Wide Web. RESTful Web services, is the application of the REST architectural style to provide information to other systems, process, etc.

At the heart of a RESTful system is a resource. A resource is anything that has an identifier in the form of a URI. Any informational item that can be named can be a resource: stock price, customer, purchase order, calendar of events, etc. The concept of a resource is broad. Here are some examples.

http://www.intertech.com/studentDirectory/students
http://www.intertech.com/studentDirectory/students/jamesBond
http://www.intertech.com/studentDirectory/students/missMoneypenny

Resources have state and it is that state that the requester of the resource is interested. A RESTful Web service requestor or client may request to read the resource’s state. A client may request to update a resource’s state. Behind REST systems is a set of client-invoked operations on resources. While not absolutely required, most have come to accept the set of HTTP methods as the general API for REST operations on resources.

GET - Read a resource
POST - Create/add a new resource from the
HTTP request body
PUT - Update a resource from the HTTP request body
DELETE - Delete a resource

The URI query string might provide amplifying information about the operation.

http://www.intertech.com/studentDirectory/students?lastName=Bond

In a RESTful system, URIs act as nouns (identifying resources) and the HTTP method acts as a verb that specifies the operations on the resources. URIs and HTTP methods provide, while more convention than standard, a terse and uniform style for information exchange.

So Back to JAX-RS. JAX-RS allows for the construction of RESTful services in Java. Using JAX-RS, REST resources are Plain Old Java Objects. The POJOs are annotated with @Path. @Path takes one argument. The argument identifies the relative URI path to which the resource responds.

@Path("/helloworld")
public class HelloWorldResource {
...
}

The URI path is relative to the base URI of the server the resource is deployed, the context root of the WAR, and the URL pattern for an adapter servlet that routes traffic to the resources.

http://:///

So, assuming the resource above was in a MyWebApp WAR, a URL request to this HelloWorldResource might look like the following:

http://localhost:8080/MyWebApp/resources/helloworld

The @Path annotation merely dictates what request traffic is sent to the resource.

Add annotations (@GET, @POST, @PUT, @DELETE, @HEAD) to the resource methods to indicate what should be invoked for each type of HTTP request.

@Path("/helloworld")
public class HelloWorldResource {

@GET
public String sayHello() {
return "Hello
World";
}
}

Methods that are annotated with @GET, @POST, @PUT, @DELETE and @HEAD are called resource methods and allow for the RESTful service clients to retrieve, update, remove, and create new resources.

By default, the resource returns text/plain. However, the @Produces annotation can be used to specify the MIME type of response. The @Produces can annotate the resource to provide the default return type for all resource methods.

@Path("/helloworld")
@Produces("text/html")
public class
HelloWorldResource {
...
}

Resources may offer multiple MIME types for any given request.
Resources may also be sent information (as part of the HTTP request body) by the client. The @Consumes annotation works in a fashion similar to @Produces but for incoming rather than outgoing MIME types. @Consumes specifies which MIME types can be accepted or consumed by the resource.

@POST
@Consumes("text/plain")
public void respondToMessage(String message)
{
...
}

As with all Java specifications, JAX-RS must be implemented. The Jersey project is Sun’s reference implementation of JAX-RS 1.0. You can get Jersey today at https://jersey.dev.java.net. To learn more about JAX-RS and the other APIs of Java Web Services, sign up to take Intertech’s updated Complete Java Web Services class.