Excellent write-up! I’ve been looking to post one myself. I’ve been using Jersey for some time now and I recently commented to a few colleagues how impressed I was as well. Not only is the implementation production quality, but quite honestly I find it to be a better “MVC” framework than any other I’ve worked with. What boosts it above the rest is not only its built-in support for converting JAXB objects into json and/or xml, but it’s relative ease and simplicity in the code itself. Not only do you get these benefits, but you get to brag about being truly REST compliant. I am still wondering when REST will become a w3c standard… primarily so that more support behind it’s use to replace the much more complicated Web Services, SOAP, and other forms of communication can be stepped up in the community. For those that don’t know, Jersey provides the same benefits you see in the above examples, for the client side. It is therefore even more of a joy to use because wrapping up a Java based SDK complete with working code to use your deployed REST services is a breeze! We’ve done just that and believe me it’s a Godsend. Having developers that want to use our REST API have already ready to use code that completely uses our full REST API is a major win for users of our API… there are those that would even prefer to use Ruby or Python that will end up using Java due to us providing a client side Java SDK for them already. Here’s the kicker.. due to us writing a number of unit tests to test our server side REST.. we pretty much build the client side using Jersey for these tests.. and voila! With minor tweaks, our Java client side SDK is done.

Your post reminds me of how incredibly easy it is to get up and running with Jersey. I played with Restlets a bit.. and Jersey is by far easier to work with and honestly much faster to get up and running and handling MVC-like capabilities than any other MVC framework I’ve worked with. Give it a try! I’d be shocked if anyone with a wee-bit of WAR-like deployment knowledge takes more than an hour or so getting a simple app up and running.

Cheers,
D.

Luis

Best regards.