Question

We are looking at which REST framework to use and where to run it.

Given an existing WebSphere (6.1.0.17) environment would you use Jersey of Wink?

Or would you recommend a different platform?

Answer 1

I have no experience in using Wink, but I can share some of my experience in using Jersey running on Websphere.

The pros… very easy to use, it took me 5 minutes to get familiarized and I’m ready writing my first hello world. Jersey does automatically generate WADL for you based on your Resources package, albeit pretty basic… but you can customize the WADL documentation yourself.

The cons… sigh, I like Jersey, but with Websphere, it almost made me cry. First (this is not related to Websphere), I’m using Spring in my project and the Jersey release I use is 1.2. The problem is that release uses Spring 2.5 whereas I’m using Spring 3.x. So, I pulled out Jersey’s Spring 2.5 to use Spring 3.x. Everything works fine. However, the Jersey test framework started to fail. I’m not able to boot up the built-in Grizzly server to test my web services anymore. Second, I’m currently tied to Websphere 6.1 which uses JDK 5. I believe all Jersey releases after 1.2 are compiled with JDK 6… that means, I’m out of luck until my company upgrade to WAS 7.

It is indeed a very stable Rest framework, very easy to use… but in my case, I’m just bummed out because all existing unit tests for the web services are currently commented out because I upgraded my Spring release to 3.x. I’m sure the latest Jersey release should be using Spring 3.x by now, yet I can’t use them because I’m still using JDK 5 in WAS 6.1.

So, it’s up to you to decide. By the way, I’m still using Jersey 1.2 in my project running in WAS 6.1.