users@jersey.java.net

[Jersey] Suggestions for downloads

From: <simon_at_dancingcloudphotography.com>
Date: Fri, 7 Jun 2013 14:45:58 +0000 (UTC)

Hey gang, I was a bit distressed yesterday having wasted about six
hours trying to get JAX-RS 2.0. Two things might be improved.

1) The "download" link seems to lead to a page of documentation
designed exclusively for maven users. I'm not a maven user, so that was
rather less helpful than the previous version. In the 1.x releases, I
had only to scroll down half a page to discover a big bold title that
said "Non Maven Developers Require" followed by a set of download links
that gave me just what I needed. I eventually found the necessary page
via totally unrelated links here:

https://java.net/projects/jersey/downloads/directory/jaxrs-2.0-ri

For reference, "normal" people will want everything in the third
archive. You'll also need to go fetch four files from the Jackson
distribution, which I found here

http://repository.codehaus.org/org/codehaus/jackson/

though I suspect there might be better places. The four files needed
are the jackson-core-asl, jackson-jaxrs, jackson-mapper-asl,
jackson-xc. Somewhere, I found that we're supposed to use the 1.9.11
releases (currently the latest) but I found things mostly seemed to
work (i.e. didn't have any issues with simple tests) with a 1.9.9
release that I "stole" from a release of RESTEasy.

2) As has been noted, the maven repository seems to be broken (or some
variant of that). This was particularly frustrating since during the
six hour search I caved to the idea that I might simply have no choice
but to use maven, and configured a maven project in netbeans, and the
darn thing still failed. Rude words were yelled at that point ;) As has
been mentioned elsewhere in this list, it seems that the interim fix
for that is to add another repository to pom.xml. I ended up with this,
which seemed to make it work.

<repositories>
    <repository>
        <id>java.net.repo</id>
        <url>https://maven.java.net/content/groups/promoted/</url>
        <layout>default</layout>
    </repository>
</repositories>

All this said, however, it would be more "normal" and I believe more
helpful if the primary download link actually linked directly to
downloads, with brief indications of their purpose. By all means offer
the pom elements, since maven is clearly very popular (and for good
reason), but please don't ignore the rest of us with this new release!
Descriptive/explanatory material is good, but it should not hide the
primary purpose of the page. It might be better if it were linked off
the side of a table, so that it can be found easily when needed, but
not hide the important details for those not interested. And, given the
interim nature of the maven repository, I think it would be a good idea
to add that information even if only temporarily, so that those who
automate their dependencies aren't just looking at a list of errors.

Meanwhile, congratulations on the new release, I know how much work
goes into these things. And, particularly, congratulations on getting
the client api standardized. That was actually what triggered my
attempt to get this all going and upgrade from the older version.