Hi all!
Even though I'm not coming to the REST refresh sprint I've been doing some
preparatory/research for it. I'm wondering if anyone on the list has
started looking at it yet or worked out an example? I took a stab
yesterday, it definitely raised some questions.
Here's what I did:
- Created a new top level module, rest-ng, that uses Spring MVC
- Created a StyleController in order to recreate our styles REST endpoint.
- Mapped this endpoint to "/restng/styles"
- Returned a list of StyleInfo objects
- Attempted to configure a new HttpMessageConverter to potentially handle
the FreeMarker HTML responses
That's about it. Just this raised a decent few questions and problems for
me:
- Right off the bat despite mapping my new endpoint to "/restng/styles" I
found that it actually ended up being mapped to "/rest/restng/styles". I
can't for the life of me figure out why that's happening. I tried removing
the existing rest and restconfig modules from the project, removed the REST
wrapper config and still had this issue. Maybe not a big issue in practice,
since we want all the end points to be under /rest presumably, but it'd
certainly be nice to know WHY this happens. Something to do with the
AdvancedDispatchFilter maybe? (In fact after a little digging this seems to
be the "culprit")
- Conflicting Spring MVC contexts. I used the <mvc:annotation-driven/>
directive to enable Spring MVC in my module. Then I added a new
HttpMessageConverter (like this https://dzone.com/articles/customizing) to
customize response handling. I could see the new converter being
instantiated and added to the list of converters, however during the
response cycle it was nowhere to be found. It seemed like internally there
was another Spring context that was being used that had the default
converters. If I remove the <mvc:annotation-driven> directive from my
context then my new converter DOES get used though. This is interesting
though because the only references to Spring MVC are in community.
- How should HTML responses be handled? Spring MVC RestControllers aren't
really meant to return HTML. AFAICT the options are use the actual
ModelAndView functionality with freemarker views, which would involve
separate controller methods for HTML calls, or to create a new
HttpMessageConverter to handle HTML requests. Both probably have issues.
Creating a new MessageConverter is a little problematic, since these are
centralized and orthogonal to the actual controllers. HTML responses in the
current REST framework rely a lot on the type hierarchy of the RESTlet
controller that handles the request. It's a little tougher to do it this
way in Spring MVC because the response encoding happens outside the
controller lifecycle.
- This seems a little more straightforward, but I assume we want to re-use
all the existing XML/JSON serialization. This will require custom
MessageConverters for those.
I think that's it for now. Sorry for the wall of text.
Cheers,
Devon
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