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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-16T12:40:52+00:00

I’m currently working on implementing the public API of our web application. The application

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I’m currently working on implementing the public API of our web application. The application is written in Java.

This is a financial application deployed on Tomcat. My users can manage their sales, customers, purchases, inventory, etc. It’s a pretty huge application. The font-end is written in Java/GWT. The backend is written in Java s well. We use the GWT-RPC mechanism between.

What we want is to provide a way to access the financial data (read + write) via a public API. This way, developers will be able to better integrate their application (like a payroll application).

We don’t use any framework. No Spring, grails, whatever. Also, no Hibernate, JPA, etc. It’s a pretty old app, with lot of proprietary code for the ORM, XML-> javabean. authentication, etc. Cannot change all of that as the application is already in production and it just works that way.

The API infrastructure will be on a different sub-domain and on a different server.

The API should use Oauth to authenticate the users.

I looked into Grails, Play!Framework and Restlet to achieve my goals

Does anyone have some thought on them? Am I going in the wrong way with those frameworks? Is there another framework to look at?

Thank you all

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’d recommend following the example of Amazon and such and expose that API as web services, without regard for UI. Your have a further choice about SOAP versus REST. I think you’ll find that REST will be simpler for your clients, because they only need to know about HTTP.

    This doesn’t mandate the use of any frameworks if you choose not to. The back end will work regardless of whether or not you use Spring, Hibernate, Grails, etc.

    You’d have to rework the application you have to call the services if you wanted true reuse, but it might be worth it in the long run. Both your UI and clients would be using a common back end API that way.

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