While researching for the Oracle SOA Suite 11g Handbook, I wanted to take a quick look at REST(ful) WebServices and see how those can be integrated into the SCA based SOA Composite Applications that we create with the Oracle SOA Suite. Currently, it does not have the HTTP binding that the 10.1.3 release of the SOA Suite used to have. So what are the alternatives? But first, how does one call a simple HTTP only (no SOAP/WS*) service from a piece of Java code? With as little programming and as much framework lifting as possible.

One of the frameworks available for RESTful operations is Jersey – a framework that should be more REST aware than plain HTTP communication oriented libraries like Apache HTTP Client, as well as offer some support for typical formats used in RESTful interactions, such as JSON, XML, RSS, CSV. So let’s create the simples Java application consuming a RESTful service – the Google Translation service – using the Jersey library.

Read the rest of this entry »