CODEWITHSUNDEEP
jakarta-eerest
kmansoor
kmansoor

Reputation: 4345

RESTful web service's response

Let's say I have the following model

Course
Student

The URI:

/courses/1

should return the following information about a particular course:

Name
Number
Date
Instructor

and: /courses

should return a list of above mentioned information.

I'm not sure about the 'return' part. If this was a JAX-WS service we would get the information about the course in question, create XML, stick that XML into a SOAP envelope and XML over HTTP to the client.

Also in a 'normal' web application, in response to:

/courses

A List<Course> would be request.addAttribute(-)'d to the JSP to render an HTML table. What is supposed to happen for a RESTful web service? Should the contents of the List be directly written to the output stream?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1823

Answers (1)

Piotr Nowicki
Piotr Nowicki

Reputation: 18174

In RESTful Web Services you define what will be the output. It can be a plain text, JSON, HTML, XML or whatever you would like. The RESTful endpoint is able to produce what you like (what you define in the @Produces annotation).

Basically, you get what you serve, so if you invoke a GET request on your RESTful resource which serves HTML - you'll get rendered HTML page. If it serves the XML - you'll get XML, just like in SOAP Web Services.

You can use the same semantics you used for SOAP Web Services. So if someone hits the /courses link, you could return whole list of courses (i.e. in a JSON format).

This could be useful for future references: Jersey User Guide

Upvotes: 2

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