On Nov 2, 2007, at 1:45 PM, Stefan Tilkov wrote:
> On Nov 2, 2007, at 1:26 PM, Paul Sandoz wrote:
>
>> If you get any feedback can you send a summary of it?
I gave my talk at W-JAX Munich yesterday (the slides are available
online [1], but I spent at least half the time talking about REST in
general, so they may not be that interesting to this list.)
Quick feedback from the audience (~60 people, 95% Java developers,
half of them with good to very good knowledge of REST):
- In general, pretty much everybody liked the overall approach
- Some people were concerned about how to integrate this with their
existing, EJB 3-based architectures, esp. regarding the SessionBean-
based layer they're currently exposing as SOAP web services. I don't
believe there's any easy way because of the architectural differences
- Somebody had written something similar (annotation-based REST API)
themselves; I'm trying to get them to take a closer look and provide
some feedback. One of the things they did differently was to annotate
the methods with the "TypeConverter" (which is similar to
EntityProvider) to be used.
Based on this last feedback, I'd like to discuss two issues:
- Maybe "EntityProvider" should be named different. I'm aware that
"entity" is the correct term from an HTTP perspective (although to be
exact, I think it would have be "entity body" in this context), but
from a Java perspective it's a little unexpected.
- Maybe there should be a way to override the EntityProvider selection
based on an annotation on a method. The one case where I believe this
could be useful is when a MIME type such as "application/xml" is used
- e.g. the JAXB EntityProvider could handle the default, while some
specific cases would be overridden.
Stefan
--
Stefan Tilkov, http://www.innoq.com/blog/st/
[1] http://www.innoq.com/blog/st/presentations/2007/2007-11-06-JSR-311-W-JAX.pdf