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Jun
12
Everybody’s talking about REST and RESTful web applications, so it doesn’t come as a surprise that there would be some kind of support for this architecture style in Spring sooner or later. Today at the SpringOne in Antwerp, Arjen gave a presentation on that topic and actually revealed what the announced "full-scale" REST support will look like. So here’s the details for those of you who haven’t had the opportunity to be here in Antwerp:
REST support will be based on Spring MVC instead of Spring WS
Those of you who have already had a look at the Spring MVC 2.5 @Controller annotation and its companions, @RequestMapping, @RequestParam and @ModelAttribute will have noticed that it’s possible to map a request based on its HTTP method:
This already "smelled" REST-like, so I guess it was just consequential to use Spring MVC as base for the upcoming REST support in Spring 3.0. I had the opportunity to talk about it with Arjen and he explained that they were actually experimenting with various concepts for doing this in Spring WS, but in the end, Spring MVC felt like the more natural choice.
But what will it look like then? Extend a welcome to…
UriTemplate and @PathParam
Well, actually @PathParam might not be the final name, I’ve also seen @UriParam somewhere, but the usage will be the same. I’ll just give you an example:
method = RequestMethod.GET)
public View getGadget(@PathParam String id) {
// Fetch a gadget by id and
// return its representation as view
}
It can’t possibly get easier that that. Best of all, you can reuse your investment in Spring MVC because the programming model doesn’t change. The final release will include support for binding to more than one URI wildcard as well as identification of the requested representation based on HTTP Accept headers (for machine clients) or file extensions (for browsers).
Additional feature will include:
- Using the Spring WS OXM support for creating XML views for requested resources
- Additional views including AtomView, RssView and probably JsonView, too
- Automatic generation and evaluation of HTTP ETag Header entries for caching purposes implemented as servlet filter
- Interpretation of hidden form fields as HTTP method (as HTML only allows GET and POST in forms) by means of a servlet filter
You might wonder whether there will be any support for building REST clients as well. Indeed there is, and it’s - not much of a surprise here - …
RestTemplate
You can expect the usual usage patterns here and Arjen showed some actual code, so it’s pretty clear what the API (which by the way seems to be implemented on top of Commons HttpClient) is going to look like. I’ll just give a few examples based on Arjen’s slides here:
// getForObject (with parameter substitution)
RestTemplate template = new RestTemplate();
Gadget gadget = template.getForObject(
"http://www.springify.com/gadgets/{id}",
Gadget.class, 1);
// Creating a resource with postForLocation
// (with parameter substitution, map variant)
Map<String, String> params =
new HashMap<String, String>();
params.put("id", 42);
URI uri = template.postForLocation(
"http://www.springify.com/gadgets/{id}/features",
new Feature("Glows in the dark."), params);
// Deleting a resource with delete
template.delete(
"http://www.springify.com/gadgets/{id}", someId);
// … and the obligatory callback pattern, albeit without
// further details yet. Method parameter will be provided
// in the form of Enum types.
template.execute(
"http://www.springify.com/gadgets/42/feature/1",
POST,
aRequestCallback,
aResponseCallback);
Looks pretty straightforward to me. So now that we know the "what", what about the "when". Well, there’s some good news here. The first two features, namely RestTemplate for building clients and @PathParam for mapping to UriTemplate wildcards will be available in Spring 3.0 M1, which is scheduled for July or August. The remaining features will follow while Spring progresses towards 3.0 GA in late 2008.
What’s left
Well, there’s the issue of authentication and authorization, which is apparently taken care of by the Spring Security team. Arjen mentioned support for configuring access restrictions based on both HTTP methods and URLs, but I don’t have any details here.
That’s it for tonight as it’s getting late and I need to catch the train back home early tomorrow. I hope to post a summary of the SpringSource Application Platform sessions early next week, so keep an eye on the feed.
Comments
6 Responses to “News from SpringOne 2008: RESTful Spring 3.0”
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THe serverside model looks very similar to JAX-RS. Hope Juergen and the rest of spring team will leverage JAX-RS model, instead something proprietary.
I really like the clientside model. JAX-RS leavs this topic behind… Definitelly will check this.
Artur
I agree Arthur, this looks an awful lot like what JAX-RS started out as, but has matured considerable. I do hope the Spring guys support JAX-RS and don’t go doing something kinda like but with no obvious benefit. JAX-RS is a fine piece of work.
Ryan-
Actually chosing a proprietary model over JAX-RS has been a deliberate decision. According to Arjen, and I agree here, it would have felt awkward for developers to use two different sets of annotations for RESTful and conventional web applications based on Spring MVC. Arjen seems to be aware that people might request JAX-RS support and suggested raising a JIRA issue for it. Considering that the underlying functionality for REST architectures will be in place in Spring 3.0 and seeing that the new Spring MVC annotations will probably be semantically identical to those specified by JAX-RS, I suppose implementing the latter shouldn’t be that tricky.
[…] 3.0 is coming out next November, and it will include the URI templating functionality. According to Springify blog, you will be able to define a URI like mystore/product/123456, and that will map to the […]
Hi,
We are looking for support with Rest.
The last blog said Spring 3.0 is coming out next November. Is that November 2008 ?? Is there a site we can download a Beta of the code??
Thanks
Phil
Clarinex….
Clarinex. Side effects to clarinex….