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 (URIs)
.
Web services developed using the REST style are known as RESTful web services.
Java EE 6 adds 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, 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
(
Create, Read, Update, 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 a RESTful web service client code for our RESTful web services
