Home/ Questions/Q 6070605
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-23T09:57:09+00:00

I’m prototyping a simple RPC server in Java for an internal application. While eventually

  • 0

I’m prototyping a simple RPC server in Java for an internal application.

While eventually I’d like to switch to a specialized, high performance RPC library such as MessagePack, Apache Avro, or the Java bindings to 0mq, right now I’d like to keep things as simple as possible, so am starting with JSON over HTTP. I’d like to use Jetty so that I can embed the webserver and make installation and deployment as easy as possible. But I don’t have much experience with Java webdev, and am getting hung up on the very simple challenge of associating each of a handful of specific request handler objects with a specific URL. My general impression is that this may be the kind of thing the web.xml file is used for, but I’d rather wire it into the source code if possible.

I should emphasize that I need no interesting webapp functionality like sessions, templating, database access, etc. I just need to get a JSON string out of a POST request body, do stuff, and then write a string back in the response.

So basically, what’s the best way to, say, write two request handlers (servlets?), which return the request body uppercased and lowercased, respectively, and register them with the paths “/upper” and “/lower” on my server, preferably without using a config file. This will be taking place in an embedded Jetty app, but you certainly don’t need to depend on that if you don’t want to.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Personally I’d do it with Spring. Spring can do a lot and as you’ve said, you don’t need a ton of web functionality, but you can still pick and choose functionality that you want from it.

    For what you need, you would set up Spring with a single controller and use a @ResponseBody annotation on the method handling the request. You then tell Spring to serialize response objects to JSON (I think it’s the default actually). Then Spring handles the serialization for you and your code just deals with Java objects.

    Here’s a more detailed article on the functionality I’m talking about: http://java.dzone.com/articles/spring-3-rest-json-path-variables

    if you go searching around you’ll likely see A lot of examples with a bunch of nasty xml configuration, but don’t worry, later versions of Spring can be configured with just a few lines of Java code.

    To address your note about using Avro, it actually not not be as tough as you might think to get it set up. Here’s a full sample application using Avro inside a servlet container for your server component:
    http://code.google.com/p/avro-http-example/wiki/Guide

    • 0