Jersey 1.0.3 was released this week. This release has quite a few interesting new features and improvements to some of its existing functionality. Paul’s blog entry gives the specifics of this release. One of the cool features in this release is the ability to inject WadlApplicationContext in resources. This provides access to the WADL JAXB representation for your restful application. Paul already discussed about its usage in the Jersey dev mailing list. I wanted to see all these in action and you won’t believe that it took just few minutes to see styled WADL documentation in action.

The following URI paths renders XSL styled WADL documentation for resources :

http://localhost:9998/application.wadl

http://localhost:9998/wadl

Here is a preview of the documentation (This works in Chrome out of the box, no luck with Firefox and IE):

I used Mark’s WADL to HTML documentation stylesheet for styling the documentation.

The HTTP response for WADL GET recorded by Firebug:

Here is the POM for interested:

    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>javax.xml.bind</groupId>
            <artifactId>jaxb-api</artifactId>
            <version>2.1</version>
        </dependency>

        <dependency>
            <groupId>com.sun.xml.bind</groupId>
            <artifactId>jaxb-impl</artifactId>
            <version>2.1.10</version>
        </dependency>

        <dependency>
            <groupId>com.sun.jersey</groupId>
            <artifactId>jersey-server</artifactId>
            <version>1.0.3</version>
        </dependency>

        <dependency>
            <groupId>com.sun.jersey.test.framework</groupId>
            <artifactId>jersey-test-framework</artifactId>
            <version>1.0.3</version>
            <scope>test</scope>
        </dependency>

The WadlResource below shows how the WadlApplicationContext injection happens and the JAXBContext is retrieved from WadlApplicationContext. The marshaller allows you to set the property which can be used to specify an XML preamble, in this case WADL to HTML documentation stylesheet embedded in the XML headers. The rest all is the usual stuff you know.

@Produces({"application/vnd.sun.wadl+xml", "application/xml"})
@Singleton
@Path("wadl")
public class WadlResource {

    private static final Logger LOGGER = Logger.getLogger(WadlResource.class.getName());

    private static final String XML_HEADERS = "com.sun.xml.bind.xmlHeaders";

    private WadlApplicationContext wadlContext;

    private Application application;

    private byte[] wadlXmlRepresentation;

    public WadlResource(@Context WadlApplicationContext wadlContext) {
        this.wadlContext = wadlContext;
        this.application = wadlContext.getApplication();
    }

    @GET
    public synchronized Response getWadl(@Context UriInfo uriInfo) {
        if (wadlXmlRepresentation == null) {
            if (application.getResources().getBase() == null) {
                application.getResources().setBase(uriInfo.getBaseUri().toString());
            }
            try {
                final Marshaller marshaller = wadlContext.getJAXBContext().createMarshaller();
                marshaller.setProperty(XML_HEADERS, "<?xml-stylesheet type='text/xsl' href='http://www.mnot.net/webdesc/wadl_documentation.xsl'?>");
                marshaller.setProperty(Marshaller.JAXB_FORMATTED_OUTPUT, true);
                final ByteArrayOutputStream os = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
                marshaller.marshal(application, os);
                wadlXmlRepresentation = os.toByteArray();
                os.close();
            } catch (Exception e) {
                LOGGER.log(Level.WARNING, "Could not marshal wadl Application.", e);
                return javax.ws.rs.core.Response.ok(application).build();
            }
        }
        return Response.ok(new ByteArrayInputStream(wadlXmlRepresentation)).build();
    }
}

MyWadlResource extends from WadlResource with the relative URL at “application.wadl”. There is already a patch submitted by James Strachan which will allow using WADL with implicit views. I hope this becomes available for the next 1.1.0-ea release.

@Path("application.wadl")
public class MyWadlResource extends WadlResource {
  public MyWadlResource(@Context WadlApplicationContext wadlContext) {
    super(wadlContext);
  }
}

The usual standalone Server code is shown below.

public class Server {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
        final String baseUri = "http://localhost:9998/";
        final Map<String, String> initParams = new HashMap<String, String>();
        initParams.put("com.sun.jersey.config.property.packages", "jersey.wadl.resources");
        System.out.println("Starting grizzly...");
        SelectorThread threadSelector = GrizzlyWebContainerFactory.create(baseUri, initParams);
        System.out.println(String.format("Jersey app started with WADL available at %sapplication.wadl or %swadln"
                + "Try out %snHit enter to stop it...", baseUri, baseUri, baseUri));
        System.in.read();
        threadSelector.stopEndpoint();
        System.exit(0);
    }
}

Here is a simple test written using the new Jersey test framework and by default it deploys the resources to the Grizzly container. The Application class is serialized as a JAXB bean. You then have access to all the WADL components.

public class WadlTest extends JerseyTest {

  public WadlTest() throws Exception {
    super("jersey.wadl.resources");
  }

  @Test
  public void wadlGet() {
    ClientResponse cr = webResource.path("wadl").get(ClientResponse.class);
    Application a = cr.getEntity(com.sun.research.ws.wadl.Application.class);
    Method m = (Method)a.getResources().getResource().get(0).getMethodOrResource().get(0);
    Response r = m.getResponse();
    List<JAXBElement<RepresentationType>> representations = r.getRepresentationOrFault();
    for (JAXBElement<RepresentationType> representation : representations) {
      RepresentationType type = representation.getValue();
      System.out.println("MediaType : " + type.getMediaType());
    }
  }
}

The other notable support in this release is integration with Guice 2.0. Maturity and quality is always the driving factor behind every Jersey release. No compromises whatsoever. Well done Paul and team!

The project sources can be downloaded from here.