JAX-RS = JSR 311. JAX-RS is available as a Restlet extension.
I'll point out one elephant in the room, though: the JAX-RS extension has
not yet received the same level of attention as other Restlet extensions
that were developed by the core Noelios team. Even the Restlet-GWT
extension I lead was mainly ported by Jerome ... I just helped over
implementation hurdles and provided concrete use cases and documentation.
Anyway. The JAX-RS extension doesn't feel as "finished" as the core of the
project, because it's not. This probably ain't right.
Also: JAX-RS feels a lot to me like JPA. I can mark up any old POJO with
annotations that brilliantly, even miraculously generate glue for a
particular paradigm (REST or relational persistence). But, to me, either
one still amounts to a very lovely, silver filigreed, impeccably wrought
glue gun.
If I'm writing RESTful web services, I want a thoroughly RESTful
architecture surrounding me, dammit ... which is what Restlet provides. I
want my Resources to know all about it and leverage it to the hilt. They
are where the rubber meets the road; where the underlying system is modeled
in a RESTful way.
So I'm kind of like Lars here, a conscientious annotation objector :-) But
I also think I see what Jerome is doing too -- providing annotations that
aren't meant to be a generalized glue gun, but a way to straightforwardly
tell Restlet things that might take a lot of boilerplate to do otherwise.
This is a neat idea. It seems like it's not meant to be a generic "RESTify
your POJO" mechanism -- which JAX-RS already is -- but a way to author
Restlet Resources with less effort and perhaps even less pratfalls. I
haven't played with it enough to know whether it fills that role effectively
... I may not get a chance before it's too late to really comment.
The broader concern I have ... well, I vainly think I see the point of the
new Resource annotations because I have become a hard core Restlet
developer. Still, what does a newbie think? It's confusing to have two
slightly different annotation systems in play at once. It looks like
Restlet is taking on JAX-RS with an alternative, and the user must choose
one. The message traffic seems to reflect this confusion is already
happening. I think having a Restlet @Get("form") and a JAX-RS @GET is
probably more confusion than a lot of folks can swallow.
Hibernate seems to have played it well by heavily internalizing the JPA
spec, using JPA where it fits, and providing custom annotations where it
doesn't. Maybe wrapping JAX-RS in a tighter embrace and making it more core
to Restlet is part of the solution.
Or, to solve the confusion, it may be as simple as modulating the annotation
names. I don't know: @ResourceGets("form") instead of @Get("form") or
such. This would make clear that it's a Restlet thing and not an abstract
standards-driven RESTful markup thing.
Anyway ... my personal preference is to leave the darned things out
entirely, so perhaps I oughtn't to be operating my keyboard to comment on
this. I only like to use annotations for purely compile-time code
management purposes (@ThreadSafe, @SuppressWarnings) and not really ever for
functional purposes. Pass the boilerplate and a side of fries.
- Rob
On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 7:35 PM, Erik Beeson <erik.bee...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Jerome was on the JSR 311 expert group but Restlet doesn't support it?
> --Erik
>
>
> 2009/4/8 Rémi Dewitte <r...@gide.net>
>
>> I can see that Jérôme has already answered a great deal of my questions in
>> this thread :)
>>
>>
>> http://restlet.tigris.org/ds/viewMessage.do?dsForumId=4447&dsMessageId=1596334
>>
>> Rémi
>>
>> 2009/4/8 Rémi Dewitte <r...@gide.net>
>>
>> Hello,
>>>
>>> I struggle to get convinced to the use of annotations for resources from
>>> all I can read from various threads.
>>>
>>> I have the feeling to lose most of the reasons to use Java. MediaTypes
>>> are strings, I find the implementation a bit tricky with reflection forced
>>> to be cached to be fast, classloaders issues. I guess there is a rule to
>>> handle annotations with class hierarchies, etc.
>>>
>>> I totally understand that some people like annotations and the work it
>>> has triggered was a good way to get the resource API even better.
>>>
>>> What are the benefits of using annotations with Restlet ?
>>> Restlet annotations are a competitor of JAXRS, right ? To what extend is
>>> it better ?
>>> Will annotations in restlet the "advertised" way of creating restlet
>>> application ?
>>> What are the other planned uses of annotations ?
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> Rémi
>>>
>>
>>
>
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