JAX-RS defines two fundamental interfaces: MessageBodyReader<T> and
MessageBodyWriter<T>, and providers implement.
I claim that GENERIC providers that work for any object (like those
corresponding to data bindings) should, themselves, be GENERIC, and
implement MessageBodyX<T>, not MessageBodyX<Object>.
I claim this because the whole API structure of MessageBodyX assumed this.
It uses Class<T> in a way that requires constant
@SupressWarnings("unchecked") if the base is MessageBodyX<Object>.
To put my money where my mouth is, as it were, I implemented this for the
Aegis providers. When I did this, I discovered that the JAX-RS runtime code
couldn't handle generic type providers. When the provider type is, say,
AegisElementProvider<Book>
then implemented interface comes up as MessageBodyReader<T>, not
MessageBodyReader<Book>. So it is a TypeVariable, not a class or a
ParameterizedType.
I fixed the provider selection code to cope, but I didn't write the
additionally complex code to look at bounds and insist that if there is a
bound the type at hand be within it.
