I think Jersey has this too, but Resteasy allows you to specify a simple
text file in
META-INF/services/javax.ws.rs.ext.Providers
This file lists a set of provider classes to automatically register.
Jax-rs runtime finds these files by doing a getResources() on the
classloader.
While this feature isn't as important in an application server, it does
matter for a client API which may not be running within an application
server. (I think JPA does something similar for finding persistence.xml
files).
Bill
--
Bill Burke
JBoss, a division of Red Hat
http://bill.burkecentral.com