Review: RESTful Java Web Services by Jose Sandoval
Written on January 15, 2010 by Allan Lykke Christensen
I’ve been wanting to learn more about RESTful web services for a long time. I was introduced to the topic a long time ago but never really got time to look into the details of implementing neither clients nor services. For ages I’ve been trying to read articles and blogs about RESTful services but none of them really enticed me. So during my Christmas holiday I read RESTful Java Web Services by Jose Sandoval. The book is very concise and straight to the point in regards to familiarising the reader with RESTful service APIs. I was very pleased with the book as it got me started quickly and gained understanding of both the concepts of REST aswell as Java options for building RESTful services. There were a few things missing from the book however:
a) No examination of RESTful client APIs such as the Jersey Client API. The author may not have felt that it was necessary since RESTful clients can be implemented using a plain Java HttpURLConnection or the Commons HTTP Clients API (Used in the book).
b) Security aspects are only mentioned in the passing. It would have been very helpful to the reader if there were a few actual examples of protecting a RESTful service using security realms and SSL, followed by examples on how to access protected services.
c) Lastly integration with EJBs is not discussed. It is simply mentioned that they can be integrated. I was shocked to find that in the reference implementation of Java Enterprise 6 there is no dependency injection of EJBs into a restful service using the @EJB annotation. Instead one would have to manually connect to the EJB using JNDI, or implement the RESTful service as an EJB (this problem is not the authors fault!! but it would have saved me a few hours if this short coming was explained in the book).
Overall I’m very pleased with the book, it is great and easy to read. It has given me (a RESTful noob) confidence in using and implementing RESTful services in a production setup.
3.5 of 5 stars!
In my next post I will try to uncover some of the shortcomings of the books with examples for JavaEE 6 (GlassFish).
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