Spec Leads,
while it is sad that work on NIO has to be discontinued, I highly appreciate that you picked up the smaller improvements.
-Markus
From: Pavel Bucek [mailto:pavel.bucek_at_oracle.com]
Sent: Montag, 3. April 2017 18:40
To: jsr370-experts_at_jax-rs-spec.java.net
Subject: Proposal to drop non-blocking I/O from JAX-RS 2.1
Dear EG members,
As you all know we have been hard at work trying to come up with an NIO proposal based on Flows. In doing so, we have come to the conclusion that this is indeed a really hard problem --lots of small details that need double clicking! After some deliberation, we have come to the conclusion that it is better to drop this feature from this dot release. Here is the rationale for doing so:
- Working backwards from the officially committed Java EE 8 release date - July 2017 - we need to start Public Review in the middle of April, which means that at this point we don't have enough time to do a design, implementation prototype and gather appropriate feedback.
- Current proposal is based on a Flow-like API, which would force us to duplicate the JDK 9 Flow concept in the JAX-RS 2.1 API.
- We don't want to introduce "just another non-blocking API", which might be deprecated very soon (when Java 9 is released).
- We need some time to work on "smaller issues", which would be most likely not possible if we'll continue working on NIO.
What does that mean for the current state of the API?
We will remove Flow.* interfaces and its usage in existing APIs, which means adjustments in SSE part of the spec. Also, we will be making at least some improvement, more related to already introduced Reactive API - support for returning CompletionStage from the resource method. It was in our last version of the high level non-blocking API; CompletionStage is basically a Mono - publisher of a single item. Resource method could then look like:
@POST
@Path("acceptProduceSource")
public CompletionStage<AnotherPOJO> echoNioEntity(POJO requestEntity) {
// not blocking the thread, returning CompletionStage and doing the work elsewhere.
return ...;
}
This improvement will simplify use of the new JAX-RS 2.1 reactive client API in a JAX-RS resource method. Note that this is already tracked as
https://java.net/jira/browse/JAX_RS_SPEC-546.
As always, any comments or suggestions are appreciated.
Thanks and regards,
Pavel & Santiago