I am using Jersey/Tomcat6 for dveloping some web services. Compared to what I did for SOAP services, I am not getting the idea what should I share to my clients once the services are developed…just the URL of the web service ?? For SOAP, the WSDL file was enough, as the clients self-generated the stubs.
My service returns a list of User objects (with 2 Strings) in JSON format. How would my clients de-serialize the JSON if I share just the service URL with them ? Do I need to share the entity bean (The User class, and the list class) on my server side too ?
I have been reading about some WADL files for REST…are they helpful here ?
Thanks for any help !
It sounds like you probably want to put together an example client to give to your, er, clients to show them how to use the REST service. Ideally, of course, your REST service would fully support HATEOAS (Hypermedia As The Engine Of Application State), and so the means of traversing the resources to get the desired results would be discoverable; I’ve found that real HATEOAS implementation is rare, though. For a RESTful-ish service (one that doesn’t fully support HATEOAS), example clients are useful. You can usually implement your example client in HTML with some Javascript; this makes everything very accessible for most REST client users.