Java Reference
In-Depth Information
RESTful Web Services
with JAX-RS
Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architectural style in which web services
are viewed as resources and can be identified by Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI).
Web services developed using the REST style are known as RESTful web services.
Java EE 6 added support to RESTful web services through the addition of the Java
API for RESTful Web Services (JAX-RS). JAX-RS has been available as a standalone
API for a while, but it became part of Java EE in version 6 of the specification.
One very common use of RESTful web services is to act as a frontend to a database,
that is, RESTful web service clients can use a RESTful web service to perform CRUD
(short for create, read, update, and delete) operations in a database. Since this is
such a common use case, NetBeans includes outstanding support for this—allowing
us to create RESTful web services that act as a database frontend with a few simple
mouse clicks.
Here are some of the topics we will cover in this chapter:
• Generating RESTful web services from an existing database
• Testing RESTful web services using tools provided by NetBeans
• Generating RESTful Java client code for our RESTful web services
• Generating RESTful JavaScript clients for our RESTful web services
