RESTEasy JAX-RS

The @Path annotation is not limited to simple path expressions. You also have the ability to insert regular expressions into @Path's value. For example:

@Path("/resources)
public class MyResource {

   @GET
   @Path("{var:.*}/stuff")
   public String get() {...}
}

The following GETs will route to the getResource() method:

GET /resources/stuff
GET /resources/foo/stuff
GET /resources/on/and/on/stuff

The format of the expression is:

"{" variable-name [ ":" regular-expression ] "}"

The regular-expression part is optional. When the expression is not provided, it defaults to a wildcard matching of one particular segment. In regular-expression terms, the expression defaults to

"([]*)"

For example:

@Path("/resources/{var}/stuff")

will match these:

GET /resources/foo/stuff
GET /resources/bar/stuff

but will not match:

GET /resources/a/bunch/of/stuff

There are a few more complicated uses of @PathParams not discussed in the previous section.

You are allowed to specify one or more path params embedded in one URI segment. Here are some examples:

1. @Path("/aaa{param}bbb")
2. @Path("/{name}-{zip}")
3. @Path("/foo{name}-{zip}bar")

So, a URI of "/aaa111bbb" would match #1. "/bill-02115" would match #2. "foobill-02115bar" would match #3.

We discussed before how you can use regular expression patterns within @Path values.

@GET
@Path("/aaa{param:b+}/{many:.*}/stuff")
public String getIt(@PathParam("param") String bs, @PathParam("many") String many) {...}

For the following requests, lets see what the values of the "param" and "many" @PathParams would be:

The specification has a very simple abstraction for examining a fragment of the URI path being invoked on javax.ws.rs.core.PathSegment:

public interface PathSegment {

    /**
     * Get the path segment.
     * <p>
     * @return the path segment
     */
    String getPath();
    
    /**
     * Get a map of the matrix parameters associated with the path segment
     * @return the map of matrix parameters
     */
    MultivaluedMap<String, String> getMatrixParameters();

}

You can have RESTEasy inject a PathSegment instead of a value with your @PathParam.

@GET
@Path("/book/{id}")
public String getBook(@PathParam("id") PathSegment id) {...}

This is very useful if you have a bunch of @PathParams that use matrix parameters. The idea of matrix parameters is that they are an arbitrary set of name-value pairs embedded in a uri path segment. The PathSegment object gives you access to these parameters. See also MatrixParam.

A matrix parameter example is:

GET http://host.com/library/book;name=EJB 3.0;author=Bill Burke

The basic idea of matrix parameters is that it represents resources that are addressable by their attributes as well as their raw id.

Some clients, like browsers, cannot use the Accept and Accept-Language headers to negotiation the representation's media type or language. RESTEasy allows you to map file name suffixes like (.xml, .txt, .en, .fr) to media types and languages. These file name suffixes take the place and override any Accept header sent by the client. You configure this using the resteasy.media.type.mappings and resteasy.language.mappings parameters. If configured within your web.xml, it would look like:

<web-app>
    <display-name>Archetype Created Web Application</display-name>
    <context-param>
        <param-name>resteasy.media.type.mappings</param-name>
        <param-value>html : text/html, json : application/json, xml : application/xml</param-value>
    </context-param>

   <context-param>
        <param-name>resteasy.language.mappings</param-name>
        <param-value>en : en-US, es : es, fr : fr</param-value>
   </context-param>

   ...
</web-app>

RESTEasy can do content negotiation based in a parameter in query string. To enable this, the parameter resteasy.media.type.param.mapping can be configured. In web.xml, it would look like the following:

<web-app>
    <display-name>Archetype Created Web Application</display-name>
    <context-param>
        <param-name>resteasy.media.type.param.mapping</param-name>
        <param-value>someName</param-value>
    </context-param>

    ...
</web-app>

RESTEasy can automatically marshal and unmarshal a few different message bodies.

Note. When a java.io.File is created, as in

@Path("/test")
public class TempFileDeletionResource
{
   @POST
   @Path("post")
   public Response post(File file) throws Exception
   {
      return Response.ok(file.getPath()).build();
   }
}
      

a temporary file is created in the file system. On the server side, that temporary file will be deleted at the end of the invocation. On the client side, however, it is the responsibility of the user to delete the temporary file.

The JAX-RS specification allows you to plug in your own request/response body reader and writers. To do this, you annotate a class with @Provider and specify the @Produces types for a writer and @Consumes types for a reader. You must also implement a MessageBodyReader/Writer interface respectively. Here is an example:

         @Provider
         @Produces("text/plain")
         @Consumes("text/plain")
         public class DefaultTextPlain implements MessageBodyReader, MessageBodyWriter {

            public boolean isReadable(Class type, Type genericType, Annotation[] annotations, MediaType mediaType) {
               // StringTextStar should pick up strings
               return !String.class.equals(type) && TypeConverter.isConvertable(type);
            }

            public Object readFrom(Class type, Type genericType, Annotation[] annotations, MediaType mediaType, MultivaluedMap httpHeaders, InputStream entityStream) throws IOException, WebApplicationException {
               InputStream delegate = NoContent.noContentCheck(httpHeaders, entityStream);
               String value = ProviderHelper.readString(delegate, mediaType);
               return TypeConverter.getType(type, value);
            }

            public boolean isWriteable(Class type, Type genericType, Annotation[] annotations, MediaType mediaType) {
               // StringTextStar should pick up strings
               return !String.class.equals(type) && !type.isArray();
            }

            public long getSize(Object o, Class type, Type genericType, Annotation[] annotations, MediaType mediaType) {
               String charset = mediaType.getParameters().get("charset");
               if (charset != null)
                  try {
                     return o.toString().getBytes(charset).length;
                  } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
                     // Use default encoding.
                  }
               return o.toString().getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8).length;
            }

            public void writeTo(Object o, Class type, Type genericType, Annotation[] annotations, MediaType mediaType, MultivaluedMap httpHeaders, OutputStream entityStream) throws IOException, WebApplicationException {
               String charset = mediaType.getParameters().get("charset");
               if (charset == null) entityStream.write(o.toString().getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8));
               else entityStream.write(o.toString().getBytes(charset));
            }
         }
      

javax.ws.rs.ext.Providers is a simple injectable interface that allows you to look up MessageBodyReaders, Writers, ContextResolvers, and ExceptionMappers. It is very useful, for instance, for implementing multipart providers. Content types that embed other random content types.

public interface Providers
{

   /**
    * Get a message body reader that matches a set of criteria. The set of
    * readers is first filtered by comparing the supplied value of
    * {@code mediaType} with the value of each reader's
    * {@link javax.ws.rs.Consumes}, ensuring the supplied value of
    * {@code type} is assignable to the generic type of the reader, and
    * eliminating those that do not match.
    * The list of matching readers is then ordered with those with the best
    * matching values of {@link javax.ws.rs.Consumes} (x/y > x/* > */*)
    * sorted first. Finally, the
    * {@link MessageBodyReader#isReadable}
    * method is called on each reader in order using the supplied criteria and
    * the first reader that returns {@code true} is selected and returned.
    *
    * @param type        the class of object that is to be written.
    * @param mediaType   the media type of the data that will be read.
    * @param genericType the type of object to be produced. E.g. if the
    *                    message body is to be converted into a method parameter, this will be
    *                    the formal type of the method parameter as returned by
    *                    <code>Class.getGenericParameterTypes</code>.
    * @param annotations an array of the annotations on the declaration of the
    *                    artifact that will be initialized with the produced instance. E.g. if the
    *                    message body is to be converted into a method parameter, this will be
    *                    the annotations on that parameter returned by
    *                    <code>Class.getParameterAnnotations</code>.
    * @return a MessageBodyReader that matches the supplied criteria or null
    *         if none is found.
    */
   <T> MessageBodyReader<T> getMessageBodyReader(Class<T> type,
                                                 Type genericType, Annotation annotations[], MediaType mediaType);

   /**
    * Get a message body writer that matches a set of criteria. The set of
    * writers is first filtered by comparing the supplied value of
    * {@code mediaType} with the value of each writer's
    * {@link javax.ws.rs.Produces}, ensuring the supplied value of
    * {@code type} is assignable to the generic type of the reader, and
    * eliminating those that do not match.
    * The list of matching writers is then ordered with those with the best
    * matching values of {@link javax.ws.rs.Produces} (x/y > x&#47;* > *&#47;*)
    * sorted first. Finally, the
    * {@link MessageBodyWriter#isWriteable}
    * method is called on each writer in order using the supplied criteria and
    * the first writer that returns {@code true} is selected and returned.
    *
    * @param mediaType   the media type of the data that will be written.
    * @param type        the class of object that is to be written.
    * @param genericType the type of object to be written. E.g. if the
    *                    message body is to be produced from a field, this will be
    *                    the declared type of the field as returned by
    *                    <code>Field.getGenericType</code>.
    * @param annotations an array of the annotations on the declaration of the
    *                    artifact that will be written. E.g. if the
    *                    message body is to be produced from a field, this will be
    *                    the annotations on that field returned by
    *                    <code>Field.getDeclaredAnnotations</code>.
    * @return a MessageBodyReader that matches the supplied criteria or null
    *         if none is found.
    */
   <T> MessageBodyWriter<T> getMessageBodyWriter(Class<T> type,
                                                 Type genericType, Annotation annotations[], MediaType mediaType);

   /**
    * Get an exception mapping provider for a particular class of exception.
    * Returns the provider whose generic type is the nearest superclass of
    * {@code type}.
    *
    * @param type the class of exception
    * @return an {@link ExceptionMapper} for the supplied type or null if none
    *         is found.
    */
   <T extends Throwable> ExceptionMapper<T> getExceptionMapper(Class<T> type);

   /**
    * Get a context resolver for a particular type of context and media type.
    * The set of resolvers is first filtered by comparing the supplied value of
    * {@code mediaType} with the value of each resolver's
    * {@link javax.ws.rs.Produces}, ensuring the generic type of the context
    * resolver is assignable to the supplied value of {@code contextType}, and
    * eliminating those that do not match. If only one resolver matches the
    * criteria then it is returned. If more than one resolver matches then the
    * list of matching resolvers is ordered with those with the best
    * matching values of {@link javax.ws.rs.Produces} (x/y > x&#47;* > *&#47;*)
    * sorted first. A proxy is returned that delegates calls to
    * {@link ContextResolver#getContext(java.lang.Class)} to each matching context
    * resolver in order and returns the first non-null value it obtains or null
    * if all matching context resolvers return null.
    *
    * @param contextType the class of context desired
    * @param mediaType   the media type of data for which a context is required.
    * @return a matching context resolver instance or null if no matching
    *         context providers are found.
    */
   <T> ContextResolver<T> getContextResolver(Class<T> contextType,
                                             MediaType mediaType);
}

A Providers instance is injectable into MessageBodyReader or Writers:

@Provider
@Consumes("multipart/fixed")
public class MultipartProvider implements MessageBodyReader {

    private @Context Providers providers;

    ...

}

The JAX-RS specification says

When writing responses, implementations SHOULD respect application-supplied character
set metadata and SHOULD use UTF-8 if a character set is not specified by the application
or if the application specifies a character set that is unsupported.

On the other hand, the HTTP specification says

When no explicit charset parameter is provided by the sender, media subtypes of the
"text" type are defined to have a default charset value of "ISO-8859-1" when received
via HTTP. Data in character sets other than "ISO-8859-1" or its subsets MUST be labeled
with an appropriate charset value.

It follows that, in the absence of a character set specified by a resource or resource method, RESTEasy SHOULD use UTF-8 as the character set for text media types, and, if it does, it MUST add an explicit charset parameter to the Content-Type response header. RESTEasy started adding the explicit charset parameter in releases 3.1.2.Final and 3.0.22.Final, and that new behavior could cause some compatibility problems. To specify the previous behavior, in which UTF-8 was used for text media types, but the explicit charset was not appended, the parameter "resteasy.add.charset" may be set to "false". It defaults to "true".

Note. By "text" media types, we mean

The latter set includes "application/xml-external-parsed-entity" and "application/xml-dtd".

Resteasy's JAXB providers have a pluggable way to decorate Marshaller and Unmarshaller instances. The way it works is that you can write an annotation that can trigger the decoration of a Marshaller or Unmarshaller. Your decorators can do things like set Marshaller or Unmarshaller properties, set up validation, stuff like that. Here's an example. Let's say we want to have an annotation that will trigger pretty-printing, nice formatting, of an XML document. If we were doing raw JAXB, we would set a property on the Marshaller of Marshaller.JAXB_FORMATTED_OUTPUT. Let's write a Marshaller decorator.

First we define a annotation:

import org.jboss.resteasy.annotations.Decorator;

@Target({ElementType.TYPE, ElementType.METHOD, ElementType.PARAMETER, ElementType.FIELD})
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
@Decorator(processor = PrettyProcessor.class, target = Marshaller.class)
public @interface Pretty {}

To get this to work, we must annotate our @Pretty annotation with a meta-annotation called @Decorator. The target() attribute must be the JAXB Marshaller class. The processor() attribute is a class we will write next.

import org.jboss.resteasy.core.interception.DecoratorProcessor;
import org.jboss.resteasy.annotations.DecorateTypes;

import javax.xml.bind.Marshaller;
import javax.xml.bind.PropertyException;
import javax.ws.rs.core.MediaType;
import javax.ws.rs.Produces;
import java.lang.annotation.Annotation;

/**
 * @author <a href="mailto:bill@burkecentral.com">Bill Burke</a>
 * @version $Revision: 1 $
 */
@DecorateTypes({"text/*+xml", "application/*+xml"})
public class PrettyProcessor implements DecoratorProcessor<Marshaller, Pretty>
{
    public Marshaller decorate(Marshaller target, Pretty annotation,
                  Class type, Annotation[] annotations, MediaType mediaType)
    {
       target.setProperty(Marshaller.JAXB_FORMATTED_OUTPUT, Boolean.TRUE);
    }
}

The processor implementation must implement the DecoratorProcessor interface and should also be annotated with @DecorateTypes. This annotation specifies what media types the processor can be used with. Now that we've defined our annotation and our Processor, we can use it on our JAX-RS resource methods or JAXB types as follows:

@GET
@Pretty
@Produces("application/xml")
public SomeJAXBObject get() {...}

If you are confused, check the RESTEasy source code for the implementation of @XmlHeader

You should not use this feature unless you know what you're doing.

Based on the class you are marshalling/unmarshalling, RESTEasy will, by default create and cache JAXBContext instances per class type. If you do not want RESTEasy to create JAXBContexts, you can plug-in your own by implementing an instance of javax.ws.rs.ext.ContextResolver

public interface ContextResolver<T>
{
    T getContext(Class<?> type);
}

@Provider
@Produces("application/xml")
public class MyJAXBContextResolver implements ContextResolver<JAXBContext>
{
    JAXBContext getContext(Class<?> type)
    {
        if (type.equals(WhateverClassIsOverridedFor.class)) return JAXBContext.newInstance()...;
    }
}

You must provide a @Produces annotation to specify the media type the context is meant for. You must also make sure to implement ContextResolver<JAXBContext>. This helps the runtime match to the correct context resolver. You must also annotate the ContextResolver class with @Provider.

There are multiple ways to make this ContextResolver available.

RESTEasy is required to provide JAXB provider support for XML. It has a few extra annotations that can help code your app.

RESTEasy allows you to marshall JAXB annotated POJOs to and from JSON. This provider wraps the Jackson2 library to accomplish this.

To use this integration with Jackson you need to import the resteasy-jackson2-provider Maven module.

For example, consider this JAXB class:

@XmlRootElement(name = "book")
public class Book
{
    private String author;
    private String ISBN;
    private String title;

    public Book()
    {
    }

    public Book(String author, String ISBN, String title)
    {
        this.author = author;
        this.ISBN = ISBN;
        this.title = title;
    }

    @XmlElement
    public String getAuthor()
    {
        return author;
    }

    public void setAuthor(String author)
    {
    this.author = author;
    }

    @XmlElement
    public String getISBN()
    {
        return ISBN;
    }

    public void setISBN(String ISBN)
    {
        this.ISBN = ISBN;
    }

    @XmlAttribute
    public String getTitle()
    {
        return title;
    }

    public void setTitle(String title)
    {
        this.title = title;
    }
}

And we can write a method to use the above entity:

@Path("/test_json")
@GET
@Produces(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
public Book test_json() {
    Book book = new Book();
    book.setTitle("EJB 3.0");
    book.setAuthor("Bill Burke");
    book.setISBN("596529260");
    return book;
}

Requesting from the above method, and we can see the default Jackson2 marshaller would return JSON that looked like this:

$ http localhost:8080/dummy/test_json
HTTP/1.1 200
...
Content-Type: application/json

{
"ISBN": "596529260",
"author": "Bill Burke",
"title": "EJB 3.0"
}

RESTEasy supports the FastinfoSet mime type with JAXB annotated classes. Fast infoset documents are faster to serialize and parse, and smaller in size, than logically equivalent XML documents. Thus, fast infoset documents may be used whenever the size and processing time of XML documents is an issue. It is configured the same way the XML JAXB provider is so really no other documentation is needed here.

To use this integration with Fastinfoset you need to import the resteasy-fastinfoset-provider Maven module. Older versions of RESTEasy used to include this within the resteasy-jaxb-provider but we decided to modularize it more.

RESTEasy will automatically marshal arrays, java.util.Set's, and java.util.List's of JAXB objects to and from XML, JSON, Fastinfoset (or any other new JAXB mapper Restasy comes up with).

@XmlRootElement(name = "customer")
@XmlAccessorType(XmlAccessType.FIELD)
public class Customer
{
    @XmlElement
    private String name;

    public Customer()
    {
    }

    public Customer(String name)
    {
        this.name = name;
    }

    public String getName()
    {
        return name;
    }
}

@Path("/")
public class MyResource
{
    @PUT
    @Path("array")
    @Consumes("application/xml")
    public void putCustomers(Customer[] customers)
    {
        Assert.assertEquals("bill", customers[0].getName());
        Assert.assertEquals("monica", customers[1].getName());
    }

    @GET
    @Path("set")
    @Produces("application/xml")
    public Set<Customer> getCustomerSet()
    {
        HashSet<Customer> set = new HashSet<Customer>();
        set.add(new Customer("bill"));
        set.add(new Customer("monica"));

        return set;
    }

    @PUT
    @Path("list")
    @Consumes("application/xml")
    public void putCustomers(List<Customer> customers)
    {
        Assert.assertEquals("bill", customers.get(0).getName());
        Assert.assertEquals("monica", customers.get(1).getName());
    }
}

The above resource can publish and receive JAXB objects. It is assumed that are wrapped in a collection element

<collection>
    <customer><name>bill</name></customer>
    <customer><name>monica</name></customer>
<collection>

You can change the namespace URI, namespace tag, and collection element name by using the @org.jboss.resteasy.annotations.providers.jaxb.Wrapped annotation on a parameter or method

@Target({ElementType.PARAMETER, ElementType.METHOD})
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
public @interface Wrapped
{
    String element() default "collection";

    String namespace() default "http://jboss.org/resteasy";

    String prefix() default "resteasy";
}

So, if we wanted to output this XML

<foo:list xmlns:foo="http://foo.org">
    <customer><name>bill</name></customer>
    <customer><name>monica</name></customer>
</foo:list>

We would use the @Wrapped annotation as follows:

@GET
@Path("list")
@Produces("application/xml")
@Wrapped(element="list", namespace="http://foo.org", prefix="foo")
public List<Customer> getCustomerSet()
{
    List<Customer> list = new ArrayList<Customer>();
    list.add(new Customer("bill"));
    list.add(new Customer("monica"));

    return list;
}

RESTEasy will automatically marshal maps of JAXB objects to and from XML, JSON, Fastinfoset (or any other new JAXB mapper Restasy comes up with). Your parameter or method return type must be a generic with a String as the key and the JAXB object's type.

@XmlRootElement(namespace = "http://foo.com")
public static class Foo
{
    @XmlAttribute
    private String name;

    public Foo()
    {
    }

    public Foo(String name)
    {
        this.name = name;
    }

    public String getName()
    {
        return name;
    }
}

@Path("/map")
public static class MyResource
{
    @POST
    @Produces("application/xml")
    @Consumes("application/xml")
    public Map<String, Foo> post(Map<String, Foo> map)
    {
        Assert.assertEquals(2, map.size());
        Assert.assertNotNull(map.get("bill"));
        Assert.assertNotNull(map.get("monica"));
        Assert.assertEquals(map.get("bill").getName(), "bill");
        Assert.assertEquals(map.get("monica").getName(), "monica");
        return map;
    }
}

The above resource can publish and receive JAXB objects within a map. By default, they are wrapped in a "map" element in the default namespace. Also, each "map" element has zero or more "entry" elements with a "key" attribute.

<map>
    <entry key="bill" xmlns="http://foo.com">
        <foo name="bill"/>
    </entry>
    <entry key="monica" xmlns="http://foo.com">
        <foo name="monica"/>
    </entry>
</map>

You can change the namespace URI, namespace prefix and map, entry, and key element and attribute names by using the @org.jboss.resteasy.annotations.providers.jaxb.WrappedMap annotation on a parameter or method

@Target({ElementType.PARAMETER, ElementType.METHOD})
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
public @interface WrappedMap
{
    /**
     * map element name
     */
    String map() default "map";

    /**
     * entry element name *
     */
    String entry() default "entry";

    /**
     * entry's key attribute name
     */
    String key() default "key";

    String namespace() default "";

    String prefix() default "";
}

So, if we wanted to output this XML

<hashmap>
    <hashentry hashkey="bill" xmlns:foo="http://foo.com">
        <foo:foo name="bill"/>
    </hashentry>
</map>

We would use the @WrappedMap annotation as follows:

@Path("/map")
public static class MyResource
{
    @GET
    @Produces("application/xml")
    @WrappedMap(map="hashmap", entry="hashentry", key="hashkey")
    public Map<String, Foo> get()
    {
        ...
        return map;
    }
}

Some objects models use abstract classes and interfaces heavily. Unfortunately, JAXB doesn't work with interfaces that are root elements and RESTEasy can't unmarshal parameters that are interfaces or raw abstract classes because it doesn't have enough information to create a JAXBContext. For example:

public interface IFoo {}

@XmlRootElement
public class RealFoo implements IFoo {}

@Path("/jaxb")
public class MyResource {

    @PUT
    @Consumes("application/xml")
    public void put(IFoo foo) {...}
}

In this example, you would get an error from RESTEasy of something like "Cannot find a MessageBodyReader for...". This is because RESTEasy does not know that implementations of IFoo are JAXB classes and doesn't know how to create a JAXBContext for it. As a workaround, RESTEasy allows you to use the JAXB annotation @XmlSeeAlso on the interface to correct the problem. (NOTE, this will not work with manual, hand-coded JAXB).

@XmlSeeAlso(RealFoo.class)
public interface IFoo {}

The extra @XmlSeeAlso on IFoo allows RESTEasy to create a JAXBContext that knows how to unmarshal RealFoo instances.

RESTEasy has defined a simple object model in Java to represent Atom and uses JAXB to marshal and unmarshal it. The main classes are in the org.jboss.resteasy.plugins.providers.atom package and are Feed, Entry, Content, and Link. If you look at the source, you'd see that these are annotated with JAXB annotations. The distribution contains the javadocs for this project and are a must to learn the model. Here is a simple example of sending an atom feed using the RESTEasy API.

import org.jboss.resteasy.plugins.providers.atom.Content;
import org.jboss.resteasy.plugins.providers.atom.Entry;
import org.jboss.resteasy.plugins.providers.atom.Feed;
import org.jboss.resteasy.plugins.providers.atom.Link;
import org.jboss.resteasy.plugins.providers.atom.Person;

@Path("atom")
public class MyAtomService
{
    @GET
    @Path("feed")
    @Produces("application/atom+xml")
    public Feed getFeed() throws URISyntaxException
    {
        Feed feed = new Feed();
        feed.setId(new URI("http://example.com/42"));
        feed.setTitle("My Feed");
        feed.setUpdated(new Date());
        Link link = new Link();
        link.setHref(new URI("http://localhost"));
        link.setRel("edit");
        feed.getLinks().add(link);
        feed.getAuthors().add(new Person("Bill Burke"));
        Entry entry = new Entry();
        entry.setTitle("Hello World");
        Content content = new Content();
        content.setType(MediaType.TEXT_HTML_TYPE);
        content.setText("Nothing much");
        entry.setContent(content);
        feed.getEntries().add(entry);
        return feed;
    }
}

Because RESTEasy's atom provider is JAXB based, you are not limited to sending atom objects using XML. You can automatically re-use all the other JAXB providers that RESTEasy has like JSON and fastinfoset. All you have to do is have "atom+" in front of the main subtype. i.e. @Produces("application/atom+json") or @Consumes("application/atom+fastinfoset")

The org.jboss.resteasy.plugins.providers.atom.Content class allows you to unmarshal and marshal JAXB annotated objects that are the body of the content. Here's an example of sending an Entry with a Customer object attached as the body of the entry's content.

@XmlRootElement(namespace = "http://jboss.org/Customer")
@XmlAccessorType(XmlAccessType.FIELD)
public class Customer
{
    @XmlElement
    private String name;

    public Customer()
    {
    }

    public Customer(String name)
    {
        this.name = name;
    }

    public String getName()
    {
        return name;
    }
}

@Path("atom")
public static class AtomServer
{
    @GET
    @Path("entry")
    @Produces("application/atom+xml")
    public Entry getEntry()
    {
        Entry entry = new Entry();
        entry.setTitle("Hello World");
        Content content = new Content();
        content.setJAXBObject(new Customer("bill"));
        entry.setContent(content);
        return entry;
    }
}

The Content.setJAXBObject() method is used to tell the content object you are sending back a Java JAXB object and want it marshalled appropriately. If you are using a different base format other than XML, i.e. "application/atom+json", this attached JAXB object will be marshalled into that same format.

If you have an atom document as your input, you can also extract JAXB objects from Content using the Content.getJAXBObject(Class clazz) method. Here is an example of an input atom document and extracting a Customer object from the content.

@Path("atom")
public static class AtomServer
{
    @PUT
    @Path("entry")
    @Produces("application/atom+xml")
    public void putCustomer(Entry entry)
    {
        Content content = entry.getContent();
        Customer cust = content.getJAXBObject(Customer.class);
    }
}

If you're deploying RESTEasy outside of WildFly, add the RESTEasy Jackson provder to your WAR pom.xml build:

<dependency>
   <groupId>org.jboss.resteasy</groupId>
   <artifactId>resteasy-jackson-provider</artifactId>
   <version>${version.resteasy}</version>
</dependency>

If you're deploying RESTEasy outside of WildFly, add the RESTEasy Jackson provder to your WAR pom.xml build:

<dependency>
   <groupId>org.jboss.resteasy</groupId>
   <artifactId>resteasy-jackson2-provider</artifactId>
   <version>${version.resteasy}</version>
</dependency>

The first extra piece that RESTEasy added to the integration was to support "application/*+json". Jackson would only accept "application/json" and "text/json" as valid media types. This allows you to create json-based media types and still let Jackson marshal things for you. For example:

@Path("/customers")
public class MyService {

    @GET
    @Produces("application/vnd.customer+json")
    public Customer[] getCustomers() {}
}

If you are using the Jackson 2 provider, RESTEasy has provided a pretty-printing annotation simliar with the one in JAXB provider:

org.jboss.resteasy.annotations.providers.jackson.Formatted

Here is an example:

@GET
@Produces("application/json")
@Path("/formatted/{id}")
@Formatted
public Product getFormattedProduct()
{
    return new Product(333, "robot");
}

As the example shown above, the @Formatted annotation will enable the underlying Jackson option "SerializationFeature.INDENT_OUTPUT".

Due to numerous CVEs for a specific kind of Polymorphic Deserialization (see details in FasterXML Jackson documentation), starting from Jackson 2.10 users have a mean to allow only specified classes to be deserialized. RESTEasy enables this feature by default and allows controlling the contents of whitelist of allowed classes/packages using MicroProfile Config.

The specification defines a new type of invoker named RxInvoker, and a default implementation of this type named CompletionStageRxInvoker. CompletionStageRxInvoker implements Java 8's interface CompletionStage. This interface declares a large number of methods dedicated to managing asynchronous computations.

There is also a new rx method which is used in a similar manner to async.

SSE is part of HTML standard, currently supported by many browsers. It is a server push technology, which provides a way to establish a one-way channel to continuously send data to clients. SSE events are pushed to the client via a long-running HTTP connection. In case of lost connection, clients can retrieve missed events by setting a "Last-Event-ID" HTTP header in a new request.

SSE stream has text/event-stream media type and contains multiple SSE events. SSE event is a data structure encoded with UTF-8 and contains fields and comment. The field can be event, data, id, retry and other kinds of field will be ignored.

From JAX-RS 2.1, Server-sent Events APIs are introduced to support sending, receiving and broadcasting SSE events.

RESTEasy supports both JSON-B and JSON-P. In accordance with the specification, entity providers for JSON-B take precedence over those for JSON-P for all types except JsonValue and its sub-types.

The support for JSON-B is provided by the JsonBindingProvider from resteasy-json-binding-provider module. To satisfy JAX-RS 2.1 requirements, JsonBindingProvider takes precedence over the other providers for dealing with JSON payloads, in particular the Jackson one. The JSON outputs (for the same input) from Jackson and JSON-B reference implementation can be slightly different. As a consequence, in order to allow retaining backward compatibility, RESTEasy offers a resteasy.preferJacksonOverJsonB context property that can be set to true to disable JsonBindingProvider for the current deloyment.

WildFly 14 supports specifying the default value for the resteasy.preferJacksonOverJsonB context property by setting a system property with the same name. Moreover, if no value is set for the context and system properties, it scans JAX-RS deployments for Jackson annotations and sets the property to true if any of those annotations is found.

Parameters and properties annotated with @CookieParam, @HeaderParam, @MatrixParam, @PathParam, or @QueryParam are represented as strings in a raw HTTP request. The specification says that any of these injected parameters can be converted to an object if the object's class has a valueOf(String) static method or a constructor that takes one Stringparameter. In the following, for example,

public static class Customer {
   private String name;

   public Customer(String name) {
      this.name = name;
   }
   
   public String getName() {
      return name;
   }
}

@Path("test")
public static class TestResource {

   @GET
   @Path("")
   public Response test(@QueryParam("cust") Customer cust) {
      return Response.ok(cust.getName()).build();
   }
}

@Test
public void testQuery() throws Exception {
   Invocation.Builder request = ClientBuilder.newClient().target("http://localhost:8081/test?cust=Bill").request();
   Response response = request.get();
   ...
}
   

the query "?cust=Bill" will be transformed automatically to an instance of Customer with name == "Bill".

What if you have a class where valueOf()or this string constructor don't exist or are inappropriate for an HTTP request? JAX-RS 2.0 has the javax.ws.rs.ext.ParamConverterProvider to help in this situation.

A ParamConverterProvider is a provider defined as follows:

public interface ParamConverterProvider {

   public <T> ParamConverter<T> getConverter(Class<T> rawType, Type genericType, Annotation annotations[]);
}
   

where a ParamConverter is defined:

public interface ParamConverter<T> {
   ...
   public T fromString(String value);
   public String toString(T value);
}
   

For example, consider DateParamConverterProvider and DateParamConverter:

@Provider
public class DateParamConverterProvider implements ParamConverterProvider {

   @SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
   @Override
   public <T> ParamConverter<T> getConverter(Class<T> rawType, Type genericType, Annotation[] annotations) {
      if (rawType.isAssignableFrom(Date.class)) {
         return (ParamConverter<T>) new DateParamConverter();
      }
      return null;
   }
}

public class DateParamConverter implements ParamConverter<Date> {

   public static final String DATE_PATTERN = "yyyyMMdd";

   @Override
   public Date fromString(String param) {
      try {
         return new SimpleDateFormat(DATE_PATTERN).parse(param.trim());
      } catch (ParseException e) {
         throw new BadRequestException(e);
      }
   }

   @Override
   public String toString(Date date) {
      return new SimpleDateFormat(DATE_PATTERN).format(date);
   }
}
   

Sending a Date in the form of a query, e.g., "?date=20161217" will cause the string "20161217" to be converted to a Date on the server.

In addition to the JAX-RS javax.ws.rs.ext.ParamConverterProvider, RESTEasy also has its own org.jboss.resteasy.StringParameterUnmarshaller, defined

public interface StringParameterUnmarshaller<T>
{
   void setAnnotations(Annotation[] annotations);

   T fromString(String str);
}
   

It is similar to javax.ws.rs.ext.ParamConverter except that

@Target({ElementType.ANNOTATION_TYPE})
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
public @interface StringParameterUnmarshallerBinder
{
   Class<? extends StringParameterUnmarshaller> value();
}
   

For example,

   @Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
   @StringParameterUnmarshallerBinder(TestDateFormatter.class)
   public @interface TestDateFormat {
      String value();
   }

   public static class TestDateFormatter implements StringParameterUnmarshaller<Date> {
      private SimpleDateFormat formatter;

      public void setAnnotations(Annotation[] annotations) {
         TestDateFormat format = FindAnnotation.findAnnotation(annotations, TestDateFormat.class);
         formatter = new SimpleDateFormat(format.value());
      }

      public Date fromString(String str) {
         try {
            return formatter.parse(str);
         } catch (ParseException e) {
            throw new RuntimeException(e);
         }
      }
   }
   
   @Path("/")
   public static class TestResource {

      @GET
      @Produces("text/plain")
      @Path("/datetest/{date}")
      public String get(@PathParam("date") @TestDateFormat("MM-dd-yyyy") Date date) {
         Calendar c = Calendar.getInstance();
         c.setTime(date);
         return date.toString();
      }
   }
   

Note that the annotation @StringParameterUnmarshallerBinder on the annotation @TestDateFormat binds the formatter TestDateFormatter to a parameter annotated with @TestDateFormat. In this example, TestDateFormatter is used to format the Date parameter. Note also that the parameter "MM-dd-yyyy" to @TestDateFormat is accessible from TestDateFormatter.setAnnotations().

In the JAX-RS semantics, a ParamConverter is supposed to convert a single String that represents an individual object. RESTEasy extends the semantics to allow a ParamConverter to parse the String representation of multiple objects and generate a List<T>, Set<T>, SortedSet<T>, array, or, indeed, any multivalued data structure whatever. First, consider the resource

@Path("queryParam")
public static class TestResource {

   @GET
   @Path("")
   public Response conversion(@QueryParam("q") List<String> list) {
      return Response.ok(stringify(list)).build();
   }
}

private static <T> String stringify(List<T> list) {
   StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer();
   for (T s : list) {
      sb.append(s).append(',');
   }
   return sb.toString();
}
   

Calling TestResource as follows, using the standard notation,

@Test
public void testQueryParamStandard() throws Exception {
   Client client = ClientBuilder.newClient();
   Invocation.Builder request = client.target("http://localhost:8081/queryParam?q=20161217&q=20161218&q=20161219").request();
   Response response = request.get();
   System.out.println("response: " + response.readEntity(String.class));
}
   

results in

response: 20161217,20161218,20161219,
   

Suppose, instead, that we want to use a comma separated notation. We can add

public static class MultiValuedParamConverterProvider implements ParamConverterProvider

   @SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
   @Override
   public <T> ParamConverter<T> getConverter(Class<T> rawType, Type genericType, Annotation[] annotations) {
      if (List.class.isAssignableFrom(rawType)) {
         return (ParamConverter<T>) new MultiValuedParamConverter();
      }
      return null;
   }   
}

public static class MultiValuedParamConverter implements ParamConverter<List<?>> {

   @Override
   public List<?> fromString(String param) {
      if (param == null || param.trim().isEmpty()) {
         return null;
      }
      return parse(param.split(","));
   }

   @Override
   public String toString(List<?> list) {
      if (list == null || list.isEmpty()) {
         return null;
      }
      return stringify(list);
   }
   
   private static List<String> parse(String[] params) {
      List<String> list = new ArrayList<String>();
      for (String param : params) {
         list.add(param);
      }
      return list;
   }
}
   

Now we can call

@Test
public void testQueryParamCustom() throws Exception {
   Client client = ClientBuilder.newClient();
   Invocation.Builder request = client.target("http://localhost:8081/queryParam?q=20161217,20161218,20161219").request();
   Response response = request.get();
   System.out.println("response: " + response.readEntity(String.class));
}
   

and get

response: 20161217,20161218,20161219,
   

Note that in this case, MultiValuedParamConverter.fromString() creates and returns an ArrayList, so TestResource.conversion() could be rewritten

@Path("queryParam")
public static class TestResource {

   @GET
   @Path("")
   public Response conversion(@QueryParam("q") ArrayList<String> list) {
      return Response.ok(stringify(list)).build();
   }
}
   

On the other hand, MultiValuedParamConverter could be rewritten to return a LinkList and the parameter list in TestResource.conversion() could be either a List or a LinkedList.

Finally, note that this extension works for arrays as well. For example,

  public static class Foo {
      private String foo;
      public Foo(String foo) {this.foo = foo;}
      public String getFoo() {return foo;}
   }
   
   public static class FooArrayParamConverter implements ParamConverter<Foo[]> {

      @Override
      public Foo[] fromString(String value)
      {
         String[] ss = value.split(",");
         Foo[] fs = new Foo[ss.length];
         int i = 0;
         for (String s : ss) {
            fs[i++] = new Foo(s);
         }
         return fs;
      }

      @Override
      public String toString(Foo[] values)
      {
         StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer();
         for (int i = 0; i < values.length; i++) {
            sb.append(values[i].getFoo()).append(",");
         }
         if (sb.length() > 0) {
            sb.deleteCharAt(sb.length() - 1);
         }
         return sb.toString();
      }
   }
   
   @Provider
   public static class FooArrayParamConverterProvider implements ParamConverterProvider {

      @SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
      @Override
      public <T> ParamConverter<T> getConverter(Class<T> rawType, Type genericType, Annotation[] annotations) {
         if (rawType.equals(Foo[].class));
         return (ParamConverter<T>) new FooArrayParamConverter();
      }
   }
   
   @Path("")
   public static class ParamConverterResource {

      @GET
      @Path("test")
      public Response test(@QueryParam("foos") Foo[] foos) {
         return Response.ok(new FooArrayParamConverter().toString(foos)).build();
      }
   }
   

RESTEasy includes two built-in ParamConverters in the resteasy-jaxrs module, one for Collections:

   org.jboss.resteasy.plugins.providers.MultiValuedCollectionParamConverter,

and one for arrays:

   org.jboss.resteasy.plugins.providers.MultiValuedArrayParamConverter,

which implement the concepts in the previous section.

In particular, MultiValued*ParamConverter.fromString() can transform a string representation coming over the network into a Collection or array, and MultiValued*ParamConverter.toString() can be used by a client side proxy to transform Collections or arrays into a string representation.

String representations are determined by org.jboss.resteasy.annotations.Separator, a parameter annotation in the resteasy-core module:

@Target({ElementType.PARAMETER})
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
public @interface Separator
{
   public String value() default "";
}

The value of Separator.value() is used to separate individual elements of a Collection or array. For example, a proxy implementing

@Path("path/separator/multi/{p}")
@GET
public String pathMultiSeparator(@PathParam("p") @Separator("-") List<String> ss); 

will turn

List<String> list = new ArrayList<String>();
list.add("abc");
list.add("xyz");
proxy.pathMultiSeparator(list);

and "path/separator/multi/{p}" into ".../path/separator/multi/abc-xyz". On the server side, the RESTEasy runtime will turn "abc-xyz" back into a list consisting of elements "abc" and "xyz" for

@Path("path/separator/multi/{p}")
@GET
public String pathMultiSeparator(@PathParam("p") @Separator("-") List<String> ss) {
   StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer();
   for (String s : ss) {
      sb.append(s);
      sb.append("|");
   }
   return sb.toString();
}

which will return "abc|xyz|".

In fact, the value of the Separator annotations may be a more general regular expression, which is passed to String.split(). For example, "[-,;]" tells the server side to break up a string using either "-", ",", or ";". On the client side, a string will be created using the first element, "-" in this case.

If a parameter is annotated with @Separator with no value, then the default value is

The MultiValued*ParamConverters depend on existing facilities for handling the individual elements. On the server side, once it has parsed the incoming string into substrings, MultiValued*ParamConverter turns each substring into an Java object according to Section 3.2 "Fields and Bean Properties" of the JAX-RS specification. On the client side, MultiValued*ParamConverter turns a Java object into a string as follows:

These ParamConverters are meant to be fairly general, but there are a number of restrictions:

There are also some logical restrictions:

ExceptionMappers are custom, application provided, components that can catch thrown application exceptions and write specific HTTP responses. They are classes annotated with @Provider and that implement this interface

         package javax.ws.rs.ext;

         import javax.ws.rs.core.Response;

         /**
         * Contract for a provider that maps Java exceptions to
         * {@link javax.ws.rs.core.Response}. An implementation of this interface must
         * be annotated with {@link Provider}.
         *
         * @see Provider
         * @see javax.ws.rs.core.Response
         */
         public interface ExceptionMapper<E>
         {
            /**
            * Map an exception to a {@link javax.ws.rs.core.Response}.
            *
            * @param exception the exception to map to a response
            * @return a response mapped from the supplied exception
            */
            Response toResponse(E exception);
         }
      

When an application exception is thrown it will be caught by the JAX-RS runtime. JAX-RS will then scan registered ExceptionMappers to see which one support marshalling the exception type thrown. Here is an example of ExceptionMapper

         @Provider
         public class EJBExceptionMapper implements ExceptionMapper<javax.ejb.EJBException>
         {
            public Response toResponse(EJBException exception) {
               return Response.status(500).build();
            }
         }
      

You register ExceptionMappers the same way you do MessageBodyReader/Writers. By scanning for @Provider annotated classes, or programmatically through the ResteasyProviderFactory class.

RESTEasy has a set of built-in exceptions that are thrown by it when it encounters errors during dispatching or marshalling. They all revolve around specific HTTP error codes. You can find them in RESTEasy's javadoc under the package org.jboss.resteasy.spi. Here's a list of them:

You may override RESTEasy built-in exceptions by writing an ExceptionMapper for the exception. For that matter, you can write an ExceptionMapper for any thrown exception including WebApplicationException

RESTEasy supports (though not by default - see below) GZIP decompression. If properly configured, the client framework or a JAX-RS service, upon receiving a message body with a Content-Encoding of "gzip", will automatically decompress it. The client framework can (though not by default - see below) automatically set the Accept-Encoding header to be "gzip, deflate" so you do not have to set this header yourself.

RESTEasy also supports (though not by default - see below) automatic compression. If the client framework is sending a request or the server is sending a response with the Content-Encoding header set to "gzip", RESTEasy will (if properly configured) do the compression. So that you do not have to set the Content-Encoding header directly, you can use the @org.jboss.resteasy.annotation.GZIP annotation.

@Path("/")
public interface MyProxy {

   @Consumes("application/xml")
   @PUT
   public void put(@GZIP Order order);
}

In the above example, we tag the outgoing message body, order, to be gzip compressed. You can use the same annotation to tag server responses

@Path("/")
public class MyService {

   @GET
   @Produces("application/xml")
   @GZIP
   public String getData() {...}
}

The designation of a compressible entity by the use of the @GZIP annotation is a built in, specific instance of a more general facility supported by RESTEasy. There are three components to this facility.

The annotation @GZIP is built into RESTEasy, but ClientContentEncodingAnnotationFeature and ServerContentEncodingAnnotationFeature will also recognize application defined annotations. For example,

   @Target({ElementType.TYPE, ElementType.METHOD, ElementType.PARAMETER})
   @Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
   @ContentEncoding("compress")
   public @interface Compress
   {
   }
   
   @Path("")
   public static class TestResource {
      
      @GET
      @Path("a")
      @Compress
      public String a() {
         return "a";
      }
   }
   

If TestResource.a() is invoked as follows

   @Test
   public void testCompress() throws Exception
   {
      Client client = ClientBuilder.newClient();
      Invocation.Builder request = client.target("http://localhost:8081/a").request();
      request.acceptEncoding("gzip,compress");
      Response response = request.get();
      System.out.println("content-encoding: "+ response.getHeaderString("Content-Encoding"));
      client.close();
   }
   

the output will be

content-encoding: compress
   

RESTEasy provides an extension to JAX-RS that allows you to automatically set Cache-Control headers on a successful GET request. It can only be used on @GET annotated methods. A successful @GET request is any request that returns 200 OK response.

package org.jboss.resteasy.annotations.cache;

public @interface Cache
{
   int maxAge() default -1;
   int sMaxAge() default -1;
   boolean noStore() default false;
   boolean noTransform() default false;
   boolean mustRevalidate() default false;
   boolean proxyRevalidate() default false;
   boolean isPrivate() default false;
}

public @interface NoCache
{
   String[] fields() default {};
}

   

While @Cache builds a complex Cache-Control header, @NoCache is a simplified notation to say that you don't want anything cached; i.e. Cache-Control: nocache.

These annotations can be put on the resource class or interface and specifies a default cache value for each @GET resource method. Or they can be put individually on each @GET resource method.

RESTEasy has the ability to set up a client-side, browser-like, cache. You can use it with the Client Proxy Framework, or with ordinary requests. This cache looks for Cache-Control headers sent back with a server response. If the Cache-Control headers specify that the client is allowed to cache the response, Resteasy caches it within local memory. The cache obeys max-age requirements and will also automatically do HTTP 1.1 cache revalidation if either or both the Last-Modified and/or ETag headers are sent back with the original response. See the HTTP 1.1 specification for details on how Cache-Control or cache revalidation works.

It is very simple to enable caching. Here's an example of using the client cache with the Client Proxy Framework

@Path("/orders")
public interface OrderServiceClient {

   @Path("{id}")
   @GET
   @Produces("application/xml")
   public Order getOrder(@PathParam("id") String id);
}

To create a proxy for this interface and enable caching for that proxy requires only a few simple steps in which the BrowserCacheFeature is registered:

ResteasyWebTarget target = (ResteasyWebTarget) ClientBuilder.newClient().target("http://localhost:8081");
BrowserCacheFeature cacheFeature = new BrowserCacheFeature();
OrderServiceClient orderService = target.register(cacheFeature).proxy(OrderServiceClient.class);

BrowserCacheFeature will create a Resteasy LightweightBrowserCache by default. It is also possible to configure the cache, or install a completely different cache implementation:

ResteasyWebTarget target = (ResteasyWebTarget) ClientBuilder.newClient().target("http://localhost:8081");
LightweightBrowserCache cache = new LightweightBrowserCache();
cache.setMaxBytes(20);
BrowserCacheFeature cacheFeature = new BrowserCacheFeature();
cacheFeature.setCache(cache);
OrderServiceClient orderService = target.register(cacheFeature).proxy(OrderServiceClient.class); 

If you are using the standard JAX-RS client framework to make invocations rather than the proxy framework, it is just as easy:

ResteasyWebTarget target = (ResteasyWebTarget) ClientBuilder.newClient().target("http://localhost:8081/orders/{id}");
BrowserCacheFeature cacheFeature = new BrowserCacheFeature();
target.register(cacheFeature);
String rtn = target.resolveTemplate("id", "1").request().get(String.class);

The LightweightBrowserCache, by default, has a maximum 2 megabytes of caching space. You can change this programmatically by callings its setMaxBytes() method. If the cache gets full, the cache completely wipes itself of all cached data. This may seem a bit draconian, but the cache was written to avoid unnecessary synchronizations in a concurrent environment where the cache is shared between multiple threads. If you desire a more complex caching solution or if you want to plug in a thirdparty cache please contact our resteasy-developers list and discuss it with the community.

RESTEasy has a server-side cache that can sit in front of your JAX-RS services. It automatically caches marshalled responses from HTTP GET JAX-RS invocations if, and only if your JAX-RS resource method sets a Cache-Control header. When a GET comes in, the RESTEasy Server Cache checks to see if the URI is stored in the cache. If it does, it returns the already marshalled response without invoking your JAX-RS method. Each cache entry has a max age to whatever is specified in the Cache-Control header of the initial request. The cache also will automatically generate an ETag using an MD5 hash on the response body. This allows the client to do HTTP 1.1 cache revalidation with the IF-NONE-MATCH header. The cache is also smart enough to perform revalidation if there is no initial cache hit, but the jax-rs method still returns a body that has the same ETag.

The cache is also automatically invalidated for a particular URI that has PUT, POST, or DELETE invoked on it. You can also obtain a reference to the cache by injecting a org.jboss.resteasy.plugins.cache.ServerCache via the @Context annotation

    @Context
    ServerCache cache;

    @GET
    public String get(@Context ServerCache cache) {...}

To set up the server-side cache you must register an instance of org.jboss.resteasy.plugins.cache.server.ServerCacheFeature via your Application getSingletons() or getClasses() methods. The underlying cache is Infinispan. By default, RESTEasy will create an Infinispan cache for you. Alternatively, you can create and pass in an instance of your cache to the ServerCacheFeature constructor. You can also configure Infinispan by specifying various parameters. First, if you are using Maven you must depend on the resteasy-cache-core artifact:

<dependency>
   <groupId>org.jboss.resteasy</groupId>
   <artifactId>resteasy-cache-core</artifactId>
   <version>4.5.6.Final</version>
</dependency>

The next thing you should probably do is set up the Infinispan configuration. In your web.xml, it would look like

<web-app>
    <context-param>
        <param-name>server.request.cache.infinispan.config.file</param-name>
        <param-value>infinispan.xml</param-value>
    </context-param>

    <context-param>
        <param-name>server.request.cache.infinispan.cache.name</param-name>
        <param-value>MyCache</param-value>
    </context-param>

</web-app>

server.request.cache.infinispan.config.file can either be a classpath or a file path. server.request.cache.infinispan.cache.name is the name of the cache you want to reference that is declared in the config file.

JAX-RS provides an API for evaluating HTTP preconditions based on "If-Match", "If-None-Match", "If-Modified-Since" and "If-Unmodified-Since" headers.

            Response.ResponseBuilder rb = request.evaluatePreconditions(lastModified, etag);
        

On the server-side you have two different types of filters. ContainerRequestFilters run before your JAX-RS resource method is invoked. ContainerResponseFilters run after your JAX-RS resource method is invoked. As an added caveat, ContainerRequestFilters come in two flavors: pre-match and post-matching. Pre-matching ContainerRequestFilters are designated with the @PreMatching annotation and will execute before the JAX-RS resource method is matched with the incoming HTTP request. Pre-matching filters often are used to modify request attributes to change how it matches to a specific resource method (i.e. strip .xml and add an Accept header). ContainerRequestFilters can abort the request by calling ContainerRequestContext.abortWith(Response). A filter might want to abort if it implements a custom authentication protocol.

After the resource class method is executed, JAX-RS will run all ContainerResponseFilters. These filters allow you to modify the outgoing response before it is marshalling and sent to the client. So given all that, here's some pseudo code to give some understanding of how things work.

        // execute pre match filters
        for (ContainerRequestFilter filter : preMatchFilters) {
            filter.filter(requestContext);
            if (isAborted(requestContext)) {
               sendAbortionToClient(requestContext);
               return;
            }
        }
        // match the HTTP request to a resource class and method
        JaxrsMethod method = matchMethod(requestContext);

        // Execute post match filters
        for (ContainerRequestFilter filter : postMatchFilters) {
           filter.filter(requestContext);
           if (isAborted(requestContext)) {
              sendAbortionToClient(requestContext);
              return;
           }
        }

        // execute resource class method
        method.execute(request);

        // execute response filters
        for (ContainerResponseFilter filter : responseFilters) {
           filter.filter(requestContext, responseContext);
        }
    

On the client side you also have two types of filters: ClientRequestFilter and ClientResponseFilter. ClientRequestFilters run before your HTTP request is sent over the wire to the server. ClientResponseFilters run after a response is received from the server, but before the response body is unmarshalled. ClientRequestFilters are also allowed to abort the execute of the request and provide a canned response without going over the wire to the server. ClientResponseFilters can modfiy the Response object before it is handed back to application code. Here's some pseudo code to illustrate things.

            // execute request filters
            for (ClientRequestFilter filter : requestFilters) {
               filter.filter(requestContext);
               if (isAborted(requestContext)) {
                  return requestContext.getAbortedResponseObject();
               }
            }

            // send request over the wire
            response = sendRequest(request);

            // execute response filters
            for (ClientResponseFilter filter : responseFilters) {
               filter.filter(requestContext, responseContext);
            }
        

While filters modify request or response headers, interceptors deal with message bodies. Interceptors are executed in the same call stack as their corresponding reader or writer. ReaderInterceptors wrap around the execution of MessageBodyReaders. WriterInterceptors wrap around the execution of MessageBodyWriters. They can be used to implement a specific content-encoding. They can be used to generate digital signatures or to post or pre-process a Java object model before or after it is marshalled.

Note that in order to support Async IO, you can implement AsyncWriterInterceptor, which is a subtype of WriterInterceptor.

Sometimes you want a filter or interceptor to only run for a specific resource method. You can do this in two different ways: register an implementation of DynamicFeature or use the @NameBinding annotation. The DynamicFeature interface is executed at deployment time for each resource method. You just use the Configurable interface to register the filters and interceptors you want for the specific resource method. @NameBinding works a lot like CDI interceptors. You annotate a custom annotation with @NameBinding and then apply that custom annotation to your filter and resource method. The custom annotation must use @Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME) in order for the attribute to be picked up by the RESTEasy runtime code when it is deployed.

            @NameBinding
            @Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
            public @interface DoIt {}

            @DoIt
            public class MyFilter implements ContainerRequestFilter {...}

            @Path("/root")
            public class MyResource {

               @GET
               @DoIt
               public String get() {...}
            }
        

Ordering is accomplished by using the @BindingPriority annotation on your filter or interceptor class.

The JAX-RS 2.0 specification has added asynchronous HTTP support via two classes. The @Suspended annotation, and AsyncResponse interface.

Injecting an AsynchronousResponse as a parameter to your jax-rs methods tells RESTEasy that the HTTP request/response should be detached from the currently executing thread and that the current thread should not try to automatically process the response.

The AsyncResponse is the callback object. The act of calling one of the resume() methods will cause a response to be sent back to the client and will also terminate the HTTP request. Here is an example of asynchronous processing:

import javax.ws.rs.Suspend;
import javax.ws.rs.core.AsynchronousResponse;

@Path("/")
public class SimpleResource
{

   @GET
   @Path("basic")
   @Produces("text/plain")
   public void getBasic(@Suspended final AsyncResponse response) throws Exception
   {
      Thread t = new Thread()
      {
         @Override
         public void run()
         {
            try
            {
               Response jaxrs = Response.ok("basic").type(MediaType.TEXT_PLAIN).build();
               response.resume(jaxrs);
            }
            catch (Exception e)
            {
               response.resume(e);
            }
         }
      };
      t.start();
   }
}
      

AsyncResponse also has other methods to cancel the execution. See javadoc for more details.

NOTE: The old RESTEasy proprietary API for async http has been deprecated and may be removed as soon as RESTEasy 3.1. In particular, the RESTEasy @Suspend annotation is replaced by javax.ws.rs.container.Suspended, and org.jboss.resteasy.spi.AsynchronousResponse is replaced by javax.ws.rs.container.AsyncResponse. Note that @Suspended does not have a value field, which represented a timeout limit. Instead, AsyncResponse.setTimeout() may be called.

Whenever a resource method returns a CompletionStage, it will be subscribed to, the request will be suspended, and only resumed when the CompletionStage is resolved either to a value (which is then treated as the return value for the method), or as an error case, in which case the exception will be processed as if it were thrown by the resource method.

Here is an example of asynchronous processing using CompletionStage:

import javax.ws.rs.Suspend;
import javax.ws.rs.core.AsynchronousResponse;

@Path("/")
public class SimpleResource
{

   @GET
   @Path("basic")
   @Produces("text/plain")
   public CompletionStage<Response> getBasic() throws Exception
   {
      final CompletableFuture<Response> response = new CompletableFuture<>();
      Thread t = new Thread()
      {
         @Override
         public void run()
         {
            try
            {
               Response jaxrs = Response.ok("basic").type(MediaType.TEXT_PLAIN).build();
               response.complete(jaxrs);
            }
            catch (Exception e)
            {
               response.completeExceptionally(e);
            }
         }
      };
      t.start();
      return response;
   }
}
     

Some backends support asynchronous IO operations (Servlet, Undertow, Vert.x, Quarkus, Netty), which are exposed using the AsyncOutputStream subtype of OutputStream. It includes async variants for writing and flushing the stream.

Some backends have what is called an "Event Loop Thread", which is a thread responsible for doing all IO operations. Those backends require the Event Loop Thread to never be blocked, because it does IO for every other thread. Those backends typically require JAX-RS endpoints to be invoked on worker threads, to make sure they never block the Event Loop Thread.

Sometimes, with Async programming, it is possible for asynchronous JAX-RS requests to be resumed from the Event Loop Thread. As a result, JAX-RS will attempt to serialise the response and send it to the client. But JAX-RS is written using "Blocking IO" mechanics, such as OutputStream (used by MessageBodyWriter and WriterInterceptor), which means that sending the response will block the current thread until the response is received. This would work on a worker thread, but if it happens on the Event Loop Thread it will block it and prevent it from sending the response, resulting in a deadlock.

As a result, we've decided to support and expose Async IO interfaces in the form of AsyncOutputStream, AsyncMessageBodyWriter and AsyncWriterInterceptor, to allow users to write Async IO applications in RESTEasy.

Most built-in MessageBodyWriter and WriterInterceptor support Async IO, with the notable exceptions of:

Async IO will be preferred if the following conditions are met:

If those conditions are not met, and you attempt to use Blocking IO on an Event Loop Thread (as determined by the backend), then an exception will be thrown.

While HTTP is a synchronous protocol it does have a faint idea of asynchronous invocations. The HTTP 1.1 response code 202, "Accepted" means that the server has received and accepted the response for processing, but the processing has not yet been completed. The RESTEasy Asynchronous Job Service builds around this idea.

POST http://example.com/myservice?asynch=true

For example, if you make the above post with the asynch query parameter set to true, RESTEasy will return a 202, "Accepted" response code and run the invocation in the background. It also sends back a Location header with a URL pointing to where the response of the background method is located.

HTTP/1.1 202 Accepted
Location: http://example.com/asynch/jobs/3332334

The URI will have the form of:

/asynch/jobs/{job-id}?wait={millisconds}|nowait=true

You can perform the GET, POST, and DELETE operations on this job URL. GET returns whatever the JAX-RS resource method you invoked returned as a response if the job was completed. If the job has not completed, this GET will return a response code of 202, Accepted. Invoking GET does not remove the job, so you can call it multiple times. When RESTEasy's job queue gets full, it will evict the least recently used job from memory. You can manually clean up after yourself by calling DELETE on the URI. POST does a read of the JOB response and will remove the JOB it has been completed.

Both GET and POST allow you to specify a maximum wait time in milliseconds, a "wait" query parameter. Here's an example:

POST http://example.com/asynch/jobs/122?wait=3000

If you do not specify a "wait" parameter, the GET or POST will not wait at all if the job is not complete.

NOTE!! While you can invoke GET, DELETE, and PUT methods asynchronously, this breaks the HTTP 1.1 contract of these methods. While these invocations may not change the state of the resource if invoked more than once, they do change the state of the server as new Job entries with each invocation. If you want to be a purist, stick with only invoking POST methods asynchronously.

Security NOTE! RESTEasy role-based security (annotations) does not work with the Asynchronous Job Service. You must use XML declarative security within your web.xml file. Why? It is impossible to implement role-based security portably. In the future, we may have specific JBoss integration, but will not support other environments.

NOTE. A SecureRandom object is used to generate unique job ids. For security purposes, the SecureRandom is periodically reseeded. By default, it is reseeded after 100 uses. This value may be configured with the servlet init parameter "resteasy.secure.random.max.use".

RESTEasy also supports the notion of fire and forget. This will also return a 202, Accepted response, but no Job will be created. This is as simple as using the oneway query parameter instead of asynch. For example:

POST http://example.com/myservice?oneway=true

Security NOTE! RESTEasy role-based security (annotations) does not work with the Asynchronous Job Service. You must use XML declaritive security within your web.xml file. Why? It is impossible to implement role-based security portably. In the future, we may have specific JBoss integration, but will not support other environments.

You must enable the Asynchronous Job Service, as it is not turned on by default. If the relevant configuration properties are configured in web.xml, it would look like the following:

<web-app>
    <!-- enable the Asynchronous Job Service -->
    <context-param>
        <param-name>resteasy.async.job.service.enabled</param-name>
        <param-value>true</param-value>
    </context-param>

    <!-- The next context parameters are all optional.  
         Their default values are shown as example param-values -->

    <!-- How many jobs results can be held in memory at once? -->
    <context-param>
        <param-name>resteasy.async.job.service.max.job.results</param-name>
        <param-value>100</param-value>
    </context-param>

    <!-- Maximum wait time on a job when a client is querying for it -->
    <context-param>
        <param-name>resteasy.async.job.service.max.wait</param-name>
        <param-value>300000</param-value>
    </context-param>

    <!-- Thread pool size of background threads that run the job -->
    <context-param>
        <param-name>resteasy.async.job.service.thread.pool.size</param-name>
        <param-value>100</param-value>
    </context-param>

    <!-- Set the base path for the Job uris -->
    <context-param>
        <param-name>resteasy.async.job.service.base.path</param-name>
        <param-value>/asynch/jobs</param-value>
    </context-param>

    ...
</web-app>

The org.jboss.resteasy.spi.ContextInjector interface must be implemented on any custom asynch injector object. The implementation class must be tagged with the @Provider annotation.

/**
 * @param <WrappedType> A class that wraps a data type or data object
 *                            (e.g. Single<Foo>)
 * @param <UnwrappedType> The data type or data object declared in the
 *                              WrappedType (e.g. Foo)
*/
public interface ContextInjector<WrappedType, UnwrappedType> {
/**
 * This interface allows users to create custom injectable asynchronous types.
 *
 * Asynch injection is only attempted at points where asynchronous injection is
 * permitted, such as on resource creation and resource method invocation. It
 * is not enabled at points where the API does not allow for suspending the
 * request
 *
 * @param rawType
 * @param genericType
 * @param annotations The annotation list is useful to parametrize the injection.
 * @return
 */
 public WrappedType resolve(
            Class<? extends WrappedType> rawType,
            Type genericType,
            Annotation[] annotations);
  }
        

package my.test;

public class Foo {
   private String value = "PRE-SET-VALUE";

   public void setValue(String s) {
      this.value = s;
   }

   public String getValue() {
      return this.value;
   }
}
        

package my.test.asyc.resources;

import io.reactivex.Single;
import javax.ws.rs.ext.Provider;
import org.jboss.resteasy.spi.ContextInjector;
import my.test.Foo;

@Provider
public class FooAsychInjectorProvider implements
            ContextInjector<Single<Foo>,Foo> {

   public Single<Foo> resolve(Class<? extends Single<Foo>> rawType,
            Type genericType,
            Annotation[] annotations)
   {
      Foo value = new Foo();
      return Single.just(value.setValue("made it"));
   }
}
        

A convenience interface to provide annotation parameter designators

@Retention(RUNTIME)
@Target({ FIELD, METHOD, PARAMETER })
public @interface AsyncInjectionPrimitiveInjectorSpecifier
{
   public enum Type {
      VALUE, NULL, NO_RESULT;
   }

   Type value() default Type.VALUE;
}
    

@Provider
public class AsyncInjectionFloatInjector implements
            ContextInjector<CompletionStage<Float>, Float>
{

   @Override
   public CompletionStage<Float> resolve(
      Class<? extends CompletionStage<Float>> rawType,
            Type genericType,
            Annotation[] annotations)
    {
       for (Annotation annotation : annotations)
       {
           if(annotation.annotationType() ==
              AsyncInjectionPrimitiveInjectorSpecifier.class) {
             AsyncInjectionPrimitiveInjectorSpecifier.Type value =
               ((AsyncInjectionPrimitiveInjectorSpecifier)annotation).value();
             switch(value) {
               case NO_RESULT:
                  return null;
               case NULL:
                  return CompletableFuture.completedFuture(null);
               case VALUE:
                  return CompletableFuture.completedFuture(4.2f);
            }
            break;
          }
       }
       return CompletableFuture.completedFuture(4.2f);
    }
}
        

In java 1.8 and JAX-RS 2.1, the support for reactive programming is fairly limited. Java 1.8 introduces the interface java.util.concurrent.CompletionStage, and JAX-RS 2.1 mandates support for the javax.ws.rs.client.CompletionStageRxInvoker, which allows a client to obtain a response in the form of a CompletionStage.

One implementation of CompletionStage is the java.util.concurrent.CompleteableFuture. For example:

@Test
public void testCompletionStage() throws Exception {
   CompletionStage<String> stage = getCompletionStage();
   log.info("result: " + stage.toCompletableFuture().get());
}

private CompletionStage<String> getCompletionStage() {
   CompletableFuture<String> future = new CompletableFuture<String>();
   future.complete("foo");
   return future;
}

Here, a CompleteableFuture is created with the value "foo", and its value is extracted by the method CompletableFuture.get(). That's fine, but consider the altered version:

@Test
public void testCompletionStageAsync() throws Exception {
   log.info("start");
   CompletionStage<String> stage = getCompletionStageAsync();
   String result = stage.toCompletableFuture().get();
   log.info("do some work");
   log.info("result: " + result);
}

private CompletionStage<String> getCompletionStageAsync() {
   CompletableFuture<String> future = new CompletableFuture<String>();
   Executors.newCachedThreadPool().submit(() -> {sleep(2000); future.complete("foo");});
   return future;
}

private void sleep(long l) {
   try {
      Thread.sleep(l);
   } catch (InterruptedException e) {
      e.printStackTrace();
   }
}

with output something like:

3:10:51 PM INFO: start
3:10:53 PM INFO: do some work
3:10:53 PM INFO: result: foo

It also works, but it illustrates the fact that CompletableFuture.get() is a blocking call. The CompletionStage is constructed and returned immediately, but the value isn't returned for two seconds. A version that is more in the spirit of the reactive style is:

@Test
public void testCompletionStageAsyncAccept() throws Exception {
   log.info("start");
   CompletionStage<String> stage = getCompletionStageAsync();
   stage.thenAccept((String s) -> log.info("s: " + s));
   log.info("do some work");
   ...
}

In this case, the lambda (String s) -> log.info("s: " + s) is registered with the CompletionStage as a "subscriber", and, when the CompletionStage eventually has a value, that value is passed to the lambda. Note that the output is something like

3:23:05 INFO: start
3:23:05 INFO: do some work
3:23:07 INFO: s: foo

Executing CompletionStages asynchronously is so common that there are several supporting convenience methods. For example:

@Test
public void testCompletionStageSupplyAsync() throws Exception {
   CompletionStage<String> stage = getCompletionStageSupplyAsync();;
   stage.thenAccept((String s) -> log.info("s: " + s));
}

private CompletionStage<String> getCompletionStageSupplyAsync() {
   return CompletableFuture.supplyAsync(() -> "foo");
}

The static method ComputableFuture.supplyAsync() creates a ComputableFuture, the value of which is supplied asynchronously by the lambda () -> "foo", running, by default, in the default pool of java.util.concurrent.ForkJoinPool.

One final example illustrates a more complex computational structure:

@Test
public void testCompletionStageComplex() throws Exception {
   ExecutorService executor = Executors.newCachedThreadPool();
   CompletionStage<String> stage1 = getCompletionStageSupplyAsync1("foo", executor);
   CompletionStage<String> stage2 = getCompletionStageSupplyAsync1("bar", executor);
   CompletionStage<String> stage3 = stage1.thenCombineAsync(stage2, (String s, String t) -> s + t, executor);
   stage3.thenAccept((String s) -> log.info("s: " + s));
}

private CompletionStage<String> getCompletionStageSupplyAsync1(String s, ExecutorService executor) {
   return CompletableFuture.supplyAsync(() -> s, executor);
}

stage1 returns "foo", stage2 returns "bar", and stage3, which runs when both stage1 and stage2 have completed, returns the concatenation of "foo" and "bar". Note that, in this example, an explict ExecutorService is provided for asynchronous processing.

On the client side, the JAX-RS 2.1 specification mandates an implementation of the interface javax.ws.rs.client.CompletionStageRxInvoker:

public interface CompletionStageRxInvoker extends RxInvoker<CompletionStage> {

    @Override
    public CompletionStage<Response> get();

    @Override
    public <T> CompletionStage<T> get(Class<T> responseType);

    @Override
    public <T> CompletionStage<T> get(GenericType<T> responseType);
    ...

That is, there are invocation methods for the standard HTTP verbs, just as in the standard javax.ws.rs.client.SyncInvoker. A CompletionStageRxInvoker is obtained by calling rx() on a javax.ws.rs.client.Invocation.Builder, which extends SyncInvoker. For example,

Invocation.Builder builder = client.target(generateURL("/get/string")).request();
CompletionStageRxInvoker invoker = builder.rx(CompletionStageRxInvoker.class);
CompletionStage<Response> stage = invoker.get();
Response response = stage.toCompletableFuture().get();
log.info("result: " + response.readEntity(String.class));

or

CompletionStageRxInvoker invoker = client.target(generateURL("/get/string")).request().rx(CompletionStageRxInvoker.class);
CompletionStage<String> stage = invoker.get(String.class);
String s = stage.toCompletableFuture().get();
log.info("result: " + s);

On the server side, the JAX-RS 2.1 specification requires support for resource methods with return type CompletionStage<T>. For example,

@GET
@Path("get/async")
public CompletionStage<String> longRunningOpAsync() {
   CompletableFuture<String> cs = new CompletableFuture<>();
   executor.submit(
      new Runnable() {
         public void run() {
            executeLongRunningOp();
            cs.complete("Hello async world!");
         }
      });
   return cs;
}

The way to think about longRunningOpAsync() is that it is asynchronously creating and returning a String. After cs.complete() is called, the server will return the String "Hello async world!" to the client.

An important thing to understand is that the decision to produce a result asynchronously on the server and the decision to retrieve the result asynchronously on the client are independent. Suppose that there is also a resource method

@GET
@Path("get/sync")
public String longRunningOpSync() {
   return "Hello async world!";
}

Then all three of the following invocations are valid:

public void testGetStringAsyncAsync() throws Exception {
   CompletionStageRxInvoker invoker = client.target(generateURL("/get/async")).request().rx();
   CompletionStage<String> stage = invoker.get(String.class);
   log.info("s: " + stage.toCompletableFuture().get());
}

public void testGetStringSyncAsync() throws Exception {
   Builder request = client.target(generateURL("/get/async")).request();
   String s = request.get(String.class);
   log.info("s: " + s);
}

and

public void testGetStringAsyncSync() throws Exception {
   CompletionStageRxInvoker invoker = client.target(generateURL("/get/sync")).request().rx();
   CompletionStage<String> stage = invoker.get(String.class);
   log.info("s: " + stage.toCompletableFuture().get());
}