WebServices are hot. Some more so than others. SOAP based WebServices are frequently seen as not very lean and agile. Robust – perhaps. Widely supported – no doubt about it. Key element of almost any SOA infrastructure – sure. Easy, lightweight to deploy or to program a client against – no, not really. Inituitive? Bookmarkable? Addressable? – none of those. Restful web-services are the easy to use, lightweight, navigation oriented complement to the more heavy weight WS* SOAP based web services. REST is the natural extension of HTTP – leveraging a lot of its potential in a very direct way. REST services focus on Resources – that are searched & retrieved, created, updated and deleted. Resources can refer to each other – through hyperlinks that equal new REST service calls. The representation of Resources – the format of the response received or sent by a client has to be agreed upon; it usually is XHTML, XML or plain text.

Under JSR-311, a formal specification for REST is being developed, with project Jersey – nearing its completion – the reference implementation. An even more mature Java project for RESTful services is RestLet – a fairly easy to use library that allows for easy publication of Restful services. Its main job is interpreting the URIs in requests sent to the server/service and routing them to the appropriate resource handler and more particularly the right method depending on the nature – GET, POST/PUT, DELETE – of the HTTP request.

In this article I will demonstrate a very first introduction to the use of RestLet with JDeveloper 11g..... Read the rest of this entry »