Java RESTful Web Services, NetBeans Style

I’ve been interested in exploring Java RESTful Web Services to backend some AngularJS front-ends, with my current focus on JAX-RS implementations.

Blaise Doughan has been blogging a lot about EclipseLink, JAXB, and MOXy. I decided to follow the code example in his post MOXy is the New Default JSON-Binding Provider in GlassFish 4 using NetBeans 7.4 since the Java EE download bundles an install of GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 4.0.

Start by creating a new Java Web Application by choosing New Project from the File menu, going to the Java Web category and selecting Web Application. To keep things the same as his example, name it CustomerResource. Select the GlassFish Server 4.0, Java EE 7 Web, with the suggested context path of /CustomerResource. If you run this right away you should be served the index.html page saying “TODO write content”.

We will work backwards a bit in his blog post, building a little infrastructure before we use it. So first we will right-click Source Packages and add a new Java Class named PhoneNumber in the org.example.model package. Paste or type his code into this class. Do the same for the Customer class. NetBeans will suggest you use the diamond inference and make phoneNumbers final. The code works fine either way.

Still working up in the blog, we will create the CustomerApplication and CustomerService classes in the org.example.service namespace. At this point you should be able to click run and visit the local URL to get our “hello world” type xml response for Jane Doe:

http://localhost:8080/CustomerResource/rest/customers/1

Everything up to this point “just works” in the excellent NetBeans IDE and GlassFish Server, but I was interested in his JSON tweaks, having seen some of the shortcomings he mentions unless I map to a JSON object by hand. To do some testing I first commented out the APPLICATION_XML line from the @Produces list so that I could see (download) the output and move forward to Customizing the JSON-Binding with it’s use of MoxyJsonConfig. This is where I was stumped for a bit.

Pulling in the JAXBContextProperties wasn’t a big deal. The EclipseLink from GlassFish library seemed to have what I was after. Just right-click the Libraries folder in the project and Add Library then choose that library and click Add Library.

To get MoxyJsonConfig, download jersey-media-moxy-2.4.1.jar and stick it someplace handy. I use a folder named Libraries in my NetBeansProjects folder. Then right-click the Libraries folder in the CustomerResource project in NetBeans and click Create in the Add Library dialog. Name it something like Jersey Media Moxy and then in the library classpath Add Jar/Folder to add jersey-media-moxy-2.4.1.jar. Then add this library to your project.

At this point you should have output like Blaise has documented for New Response in his blog post. Enjoy.

If you can’t find jersey-media-moxy-2.4.1.jar or the API has switched around again and a later version is missing the dependency, then read on for my tale of woe and sorrow trying to locate it in the first place. Perhaps it will help.

I haven’t jumped on board with maven yet, so when I came across Blaise’s follow-up question to the StackOverflow question Cannot import EclipseLink MOXy while searching for MoxyJsonConfig where he implied the use of Maven, I was a little disappointed. I was equally disappointed in my next dozen searches all failing to find the jar containing MoxyJsonConfig. I could find API docs, people talking about using it, etc. findjar.com failed. Even mvnrepository.com searches failed. Finally after Google searches of varying portions of the class or package name, one for org.glassfish.jersey.moxy pointed me to jersey-media-moxy within MVN. Unfortunately it was pointing me to 2.0-m07 which has MoxyJsonConfiguration and not MoxyJsonConfig. I didn’t realize that right away and tried implementing using it. It doesn’t work. The current latest version, 2.4.1, has MoxyJsonConfig and does work. I have no idea when things changed or what version Blaise used.

I was glad to finally find the jar, but there has got to be some better way to find a class and know what version of things people are talking about. If there is, please share. If there isn’t, please keep this in mind when sharing code examples.