Thank you guys for those insights.
I had mixed feelings about the proxy based solution regardless of the
content type negotiation issue. It was thinking this type of proxy would
allow to write faster some clients, in a more synthetic way and easier
to refactor/maintain as the changes on the interface would automatically
propagated to the client. In some context like testing, it wouldn't be a
big deal for me to couple the client to the server to leverage the
proxy. In the other hand a GET on collection for example, with a lot of
unused query strings would be kind of painful to write with the proxy
whereas the solution based on client jersey is more suitable.
Anyway, I have to agree that it doesn't give much over using jersey
client as it.
Jean.
Paul Sandoz wrote:
> On Dec 2, 2009, at 3:10 PM, gerard davison wrote:
>
>
> Hi,
>
> Unfortunately my implementation of this is still stuck with legal but I do hope to contribute it to the Jersey project at some point in the future. I do agree generally with what Paul has said about the content type challenges and the inadvisability of trying the share the interfaces between clients and servers. Some of more thoughts on this topic are here:
>
> http://kingsfleet.blogspot.com/2009/10/proxy-client-based-on-jersey-with-bit.html
>
> I have taken it a little bit further on the server side to allow a similar model; but I haven't had time to write this up as yet.
>
> One solution to the mutliple content type challenge that occurred to us is that if you are generating a java API it would make sense to pick at this point which content type you wanted. This only works is you have a consistent content type of course. The other workarounds are to have the client interface return ClientResponse where the user can select there own type and of course to generate a method for each. (I have gotten the ClientResponse version working easily, I think RESTEasy use the same solution)
>
> Another thing you need to consider is how to deal with sub resources, this is where the proxing method start to look more interesting when compared to the client fluent interface.
>
>
> What about if there were an easier way to obtain resources from links in representations? including say from the Location or Link headers.
>
>
> I am going to have to ponder that Ruby example a little bit to see if we can build something similar using Java, there are some interesting ideas there. I guess by typed you mean the "rel" value.
>
> Yes.
>
> But i think other patterns might also apply, even if they are less flexible or more coupled than typed links, using perhaps general XPathy like expressions.
>
> Paul.
>
> This should be possible using the existing mechanisms in JAXB.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Gerard
>
>
> On 01/12/2009 09:25, Paul Sandoz wrote:
> Hi Jean,
>
> A proxy-based client-side solution has been discussed, but there is nothing implemented in Jersey to support this. Notably, Gerard Davidson has some ideas in this area.
>
> My opinion is that such proxies, as you present, unduly encourages the coupling of the client to the server and it really does not give much over utilizing the Jersey client API as of today, for example:
>
> Client c = Client.create();
> URI u = ...
> UriBuilder ub = UriBuilder.fromUri(u).path("product/{id}");
>
> ProductConverter pc = c.resource(ub.build(1)).get(ProductConverter.class);
> c.resource(ub.build(2)).put(new ProductConverter());
>
> Or creating a simple ProductResource class that encapsulates the above. Note that in your ProductResource interface there is no way the client can distinguish between XML or JSON.
>
> I think the main advantage to any proxy-based solution is in terms of documentation and especially when utilized with IDEs.
>
> What i would really like to see is a focus on proxy-based solutions for *representations* supporting typed links. That IMHO is the right place for proxying or even static code generation as the media types and link types are important types for hypermedia processing. There has been some nice work w.r.t. in Ruby:
>
> http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/11/restfulie-hypermedia-services
>
> Any exploration of the client area also needs to be coupled with solutions on the server-side for supporting typed links.
>
> Paul.
>
> On Dec 1, 2009, at 3:14 AM, Jean Aurambault wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I'm thinking about a way of generating automatically clients for a WS based on reflection. Could be by sharing the WS definition in an interface or even using directly a jersey annotated class... Let's say with an interface it would be something like this:
>
> public interface ProductResource {
>
> @Path("/product/{id}")
> @GET
> @Produces({"application/xml", "application/json"})
> public ProductConverter get(@PathParam("id") int id);
>
> @Path("/product/{id}")
> @PUT
> @Consumes({"application/xml", "application/json"})
> public void put(@PathParam("id") int id, ProductConverter productConverter);
> }
>
> the server would implement the interface
>
> public class ProductResourceServerImpl implements ProductResource {
> ...
> }
>
> And on the client side having something like this:
>
> Client client = new Client();
> ProductResource pr = client.resource(ProductResource.class);
> ProductConverter product = pr.get(1);
> pr.put(2, new ProductConverter());
>
> Is there anything close to this available? Any thoughts?
>
> best regards,
>
> Jean
>
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> Gerard Davison | Senior Principal Software Engineer | +44 118 924 5095
> Oracle JDeveloper Web Service, Spring, Weblogic SCA Tooling Development
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