Home/ Questions/Q 38647
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-10T14:44:27+00:00

What is a good way to render data produced by a Java process in

  • 0

What is a good way to render data produced by a Java process in the browser?

I’ve made extensive use of JSP and the various associated frameworks (JSTL, Struts, Tapestry, etc), as well as more comprehensive frameworks not related to JSP (GWT, OpenLaszlo). None of the solutions have ever been entirely satisfactory – in most cases the framework is too constrained or too complex for my needs, while others would require extensive refactoring of existing code. Additionally, most frameworks seem to have performance problems.

Currently I’m leaning towards the solution of exposing my java data via a simple servlet that returns JSON, and then rendering the data using PHP or Ruby. This has the added benefit of instantly exposing my service as a web service as well, but I’m wondering if I’m reinventing the wheel here.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. I personally use Tapestry 5 for creating webpages with Java, but I agree that it can sometimes be a bit overkill. I would look into using JAX-RS (java.net project, jsr311) it is pretty simple to use, it supports marshalling and unmarshalling objects to/from XML out of the box. It is possible to extend it to support JSON via Jettison.

    There are two implementations that I have tried:

    • Jersey – the reference implementation for JAX-RS.
    • Resteasy – the implementation I prefer, good support for marshalling and unmarshalling a wide-range of formats. Also pretty stable and has more features that Jersey.

    Take a look at the following code to get a feeling for what JAX-RS can do for you:

    @Path('/') class TestClass {     @GET     @Path('text')     @Produces('text/plain')     String getText() {         return 'String value';     } }

    This tiny class will expose itself at the root of the server (@Path on the class), then expose the getText() method at the URI /text and allow access to it via HTTP GET. The @Produces annotation tells the JAX-RS framework to attempt to turn the result of the method into plain text.

    The easiest way to learn about what is possible with JAX-RS is to read the specification.

    • 0