Comprehensive REST Support [SPR-4419]

[spring-projects-issues]

Rob Harrop opened SPR-4419 and commented

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Sub-tasks:

• URI Templates in @RequestMapping [SPR-5251] #9925 URI Templates in @RequestMapping
• Shallow ETag support [SPR-5252] #9926 Shallow ETag support
• RestTemplate [SPR-5260] #9934 RestTemplate
• Support for PUT and DELETE in spring:form tag [SPR-5267] #9940 Support for PUT and DELETE in spring:form tag
• Support for PUTting and POSTing non-form data [SPR-5409] #10082 Support for PUTting and POSTing non-form data
• Content negotiation [SPR-5452] #10125 Content negotiation
• Support for matrix parameters [SPR-5499] #10171 Support for matrix parameters

Issue Links:

• Update Petclinic sample to showcase REST support [SPR-5483] #10156 Update Petclinic sample to showcase REST support
• @RequestMapping: convention-based URL mapping at controller class level [SPR-5058] #9733 @RequestMapping: convention-based URL mapping at controller class level
• Return 405 instead of 404 when HTTP method is not supported [SPR-4927] #9602 Return 405 instead of 404 when HTTP method is not supported

Referenced from: commits a1545e3

38 votes, 51 watchers

[spring-projects-issues]

Seth Ladd commented

Rob,

I'd be very interested in this. Curious what your requirements are for a REST interface? My previous email to the list (which, after checking the list archives, I'm not sure ever got to the list):

I'm working on a project at the moment that is using Spring for REST and
I'll probably integrate some of my findings into the main codebase if
they warrant it. So far I have found it extremely simple to build
RESTful services using Spring out of the box - I just have a few
framework controllers that parse the request into a DOM Document for XML
REST services, some that automatically bind XML input to a command
object etc.

One of the nice things about Ruby on Rails is its support for pretty
URI's that map directly to object instances. The URI's also map
directly to the operations in CRUD.

The CRUD operations conform directly to the RESTful HTTP methods.

In developing a RESTful framework, I'd love to see a URL Mapper and
Controller(s) that enable easy CRUD operations, such as Rails does.
This would be a nice step towards a REST framework.

When talking about a REST framework, I usually mean supported GET,
POST, PUT, and DELETE completely. You can emulate this w/ web
browsers, as PUT and DELETE aren't supported in forms. I see another
addition to a Spring REST framework is a Controller that natively
handles the old doPut(), doDelete(), etc methods. Or at least, a
Controller than can delegate based on the HTTP method.

We wrote a RESTful reliable messaging service using Spring, and it was
very simple. The only new piece of framework code we added was the
delegating http method controller, so help route each method
operation. Felt like the old days of servlet programming. :)

[spring-projects-issues]

Tim Shadel commented

While this article claims that there really isn't any framework needs for REST that Spring should provide, <a href=http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-rest/2005-November/000042.html"">other examples [in Ruby] of useful RESTful framework functionality exist that indicate there is a need for such functionality. I'd be very interested to see Spring's support for REST be similar.

[spring-projects-issues]

Rintcius Blok commented

When I was looking at rest I stumbled on both this feature request and the following implementation: http://www.restlet.org/
I haven't looked at restlet in detail but the tutorial looked good to me. Maybe an idea to integrate it with spring?

[spring-projects-issues]

Jerome Louvel commented

Version 1.0 beta 1 of the Restlet framework was released today. I think the API is quite stable now and it could be a good time to consider an integration with Spring. I would be happy to support such an effort if anyone from the Spring community wants to lead it.
http://blog.noelios.com/2006/01/26/restlet-10-beta-1-released/

[spring-projects-issues]

Jerome Louvel commented

Based on the feed-back of several Restlet users, we progressively improved our integration with Spring.

We have just added a FAQ entry covering the various integration modes at:
http://www.restlet.org/documentation/1.0/faq#23

You can also check out the Spring extension Javadocs at:
http://www.restlet.org/documentation/1.0/ext/index.html?org/restlet/ext/spring/package-summary.html

If Spring commiters are interested, we would be open to contribute some integration code to facilitate the support of REST directly from Spring.

Best regards,
Jerome Louvel
http://www.restlet.org

[spring-projects-issues]

Kim Pepper commented

While Spring MVC can handle a simple implementation, it lacks the support of many REST concepts such as:

• resource mapping: url templates etc.
• content negotiation: multiple representations of a resource including handling 415 "Unsupported Media Type"
• error conditions: handling responses correctly by sending different status codes e.g. 400 "Bad Request", 201 "Created", etc.
• etag support: similar to the getLastModified() interface
• http method support: templates for GET, PUT, DELETE, POST, HEAD, and OPTIONS (WedDav support too?) as well as handling 405 "Method Not Allowed".

Also, does it need to be tied to the Servlet API?

[spring-projects-issues]

Kim Pepper commented

Actually, I'm not sure whether Spring-WS will be a good base to build this on. The concepts of RPC and REST seem too far apart. How much common code would there be?

It might be better to start a new Spring-REST project?

[spring-projects-issues]

Arjen Poutsma commented

First off, Spring-WS is not RPC, it is XML messaging :).

But I agree: the REST support will not be based on the SOAP/POX part of Spring-WS, though we will leverage the XML Marshalling module in there. It is just going to be part of the Spring-WS project.

[spring-projects-issues]

Arjen Poutsma commented

Change of plan: this is not going to be part of Spring-WS, but of Spring-MVC.

[spring-projects-issues]

Oliver Drotbohm commented

Is there already a ticket in Sring Core Project for this? I guess it would be to be found in WEB component, won't it? Will the marshalling support currently available with SpringWS also be moved (as it would be usable for rest responses , too)?

There is a Google Code project, that seems to have some nice ideas on using MVC controllers and Annotations to provide dedicated support:

http://code.google.com/p/polarrose-spring-rest/

Regards, Ollie.

[spring-projects-issues]

Arjen Poutsma commented

Moved back to Spring Core

[spring-projects-issues]

Arjen Poutsma commented

Yes, the Object/XML mapping module of Spring-WS will also be moved into the core.

[spring-projects-issues]

Daigo Kobayashi commented

How does spring team implements REST support? Does spring team has any plan to integrate with JAX-RS(JSR-311)?
I think Spring 2.5's mvc introduce similar concept of JAX-RS. So JAX-RS integration is reasonable.

[spring-projects-issues]

Arjen Poutsma commented

Unfortunately, we can't mix-and-match Spring MVC with JAX-RS in a satisfying model, because

1. JAX-RS annotations overlap with the Spring MVC annotations introduced in 2.5. This could result in duplicate request mappings, for instance.
2. JAX-RS is semantically different than Spring MVC, i.e. stateful vs. stateless
3. JAX-RS focusses on RESTful web services only, while Spring MVC focusses on web sites.

This does not rule out the possibility of using a JAX-RS as a backend to Spring MVC, something we are considering. Finally: we are also considering offering JAX-RS support in 3.0/3.1, in the same way we did for JAX-WS in Spring 2.5.

[spring-projects-issues]

Arjen Poutsma commented

As much as I like the "Comprehensive" in the name of this issue, it's rather difficult to track when it's done :). So I will start creating some sub tasks under this issue, to indicate where we are taking this.