From: Andrew Ochsner <aochsner_at_cs.stanford.edu>
Date: Thu, 9 Apr 2009 10:09:37 -0600

Hi guys:

So I'll be honest, I took a look at the JSR311 spec around this and I'm not
spec-ologist but it feels like this should work. Seems that if there's a
regex in my @Path annotation then things don't work quite as I expected.

Here's a small test
@Path("/test")
public class TestResource {
    @GET
    @Path("/{one: abc.*}")
    public Response firstMethod(@PathParam("one") String one) {
        System.out.println("one");
        System.out.println(one);
        return Response.noContent().build(); // 204
    }

    @GET
    @Path("/{one: (?!abc).*}")
    public Response secondMethod(@PathParam("one") String one) {
        System.out.println("two");
        System.out.println(one);
        return Response.notModified().build(); // 304
    }

    @POST
    @Path("/{one}")
    public Response thirdMethod(@PathParam("one") String one) {
        System.out.println("three");
        System.out.println(one);
        return Response.ok().build(); // 200
    }
}

And the following results for various requests:
GET http://localhost:9998/test/abc123 -> 204
GET http://localhost:9998/test/fred -> 304
POST http://localhost:9998/test/fred -> 405!! <- NOT 200

This doesn't seem right. As an aside, I noticed that if I set
"secondMethod" to:
    @GET
    @Path("/{one}")
    public Response secondMethod(@PathParam("one") String one) {

Things work as expected.

Now, I'll be honest, I'm not exactly a regex expert either and I'm having a
hard time with this. Is there a more correct way to say "does not match
'abc'"? I've tried a few combinations including [^a][^b][^c].*

Is this expected behavior or is this a bug? Like I said, I have a solution
to go forward with, just thought it was worth raising your attention to...

Thanks
Andy O