Resources linking in Dropwizard / JAX-RS 1.x (JSR 311)

Question

I've got a problem with resources linking in Dropwizard. With JAX-RS 2.0 we've got magical javax.ws.rs.core.Link class which with it's builder can do almost all the work for you. Unfortunately Dropwizard 0.7.1 doesn't depend on the new 2.0 API, but on the old javax.ws.rs:jsr311-api API, which can't handle linking. Or can it? This is the problem I want to solve with Dropwizard. I probably have two ways to do it and I don't know if any of them is valid:

• Option 1: I add JAX-RS 2.0 dependency to my project. Voila! I've got Link. But the problem is, that it doesn't work well with old implementations from Jersey - I got AbstractMethodException from UriBuilder, which apparently changed from version 1 to 2. So the answer is to supply new implementations. Can I do it? If yes, than how can I do it? Will new implementations work with dropwizard well?

• Option 2: I can just add some other resource linking to dropwizard. Is there some other linking standard/library? I can't use jersey-declarative-linking because it mixes representations with the resources (the linking takes place in representations), and I want my representations not to know a thing about resources layer. So is there another linking standard for Dropwizard, Jersey and JAX-RS 1?

Answer 1

I've finally found an answer to my question.

Option 2 was a dead end. There was no other jax-rs-2-like linking library to either dropwizard or jersey itself.

Option one also was hard to do, but fortunatelly yesterday dropwizard released version 0.8.0-rc1 of their framework, which depends on jersey 2, which is the implementation of JAX-RS 2.0. So for all of you that want to have HATEOAS in dropwizard, version 0.8.0 is for you.