Jersey hello world example

Jersey, reference implementation to develope RESTful web service based on the JAX-RS (JSR 311) specification.

In this tutorial, we show you how to develop a simple hello world REST web application with Jersey.

Technologies and Tools used in this article:

• Jersey 1.8
• JDK 1.6
• Tomcat 6.0
• Maven 3.0.3
• Eclipse 3.6

1. Directory Structure

This is the final web project structure of this tutorial.

2. Standard Web Project

Create a standard Maven web project structure.

mvn archetype:generate -DgroupId=com.mkyong.rest -DartifactId=RESTfulExample 
    -DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-webapp -DinteractiveMode=false

Note

To support Eclipse, use Maven command :

mvn eclipse:eclipse -Dwtpversion=2.0

3. Project Dependencies

Jersey is published in Java.net Maven repository. To develop Jersey REST application , just declares “jersey-server” in Maven pom.xml.

File : pom.xml

<project ...>

    <repositories>
        <repository>
            <id>maven2-repository.java.net</id>
            <name>Java.net Repository for Maven</name>
            <url>http://download.java.net/maven/2/</url>
            <layout>default</layout>
        </repository>
    </repositories>

    <dependencies>

        <dependency>
            <groupId>com.sun.jersey</groupId>
            <artifactId>jersey-server</artifactId>
            <version>1.8</version>
        </dependency>

    </dependencies>

</project>

4. REST Service

Simple REST service with Jersey.

package com.mkyong.rest;

import javax.ws.rs.GET;
import javax.ws.rs.Path;
import javax.ws.rs.PathParam;
import javax.ws.rs.core.Response;

@Path("/hello")
public class HelloWorldService {

    @GET
    @Path("/{param}")
    public Response getMsg(@PathParam("param") String msg) {

        String output = "Jersey say : " + msg;

        return Response.status(200).entity(output).build();

    }

}

5. web.xml

In web.xml, register “com.sun.jersey.spi.container.servlet.ServletContainer“, and puts your Jersey service folder under “init-param“, “com.sun.jersey.config.property.packages“.

File : web.xml

<web-app id="WebApp_ID" version="2.4"
    xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee" 
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee 
    http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee/web-app_2_4.xsd">
    <display-name>Restful Web Application</display-name>

    <servlet>
        <servlet-name>jersey-serlvet</servlet-name>
        <servlet-class>
                     com.sun.jersey.spi.container.servlet.ServletContainer
                </servlet-class>
        <init-param>
             <param-name>com.sun.jersey.config.property.packages</param-name>
             <param-value>com.mkyong.rest</param-value>
        </init-param>
        <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
    </servlet>

    <servlet-mapping>
        <servlet-name>jersey-serlvet</servlet-name>
        <url-pattern>/rest/*</url-pattern>
    </servlet-mapping>

</web-app>

6. Demo

In this example, web request from “projectURL/rest/hello/” will match to “HelloWorldService“, via @Path("/hello").

And the “{any values}” from “projectURL/rest/hello/{any values}” will match to parameter annotated with @PathParam.

URL : http://localhost:8080/RESTfulExample/rest/hello/mkyong