JAX-RS Extender Bundle for OSGi

This is an OSGi extender bundle that can be used to declaratively create JAX-RS applications. It has the following benefits:

• Dynamically deploy and undeploy JAX-RS applications at runtime.
• Completely declarative... just build the Resource classes and list them in the bundle manifest.
• No OSGi or Jersey code to write... just code against the standard JAX-RS APIs/annotations.
• Your application bundles are decoupled from OSGi and Jersey. They could be used in a non-OSGi environment or with an alternative JAX-RS implementation.

From an application developer's point of view, the extender is extremely simple to use. Simply build a bundle containing the Resource and Provider classes -- marked up with standard JAX-RS annotations -- and add the following two headers to the bundle manifest:

JAX-RS-Alias: /example
JAX-RS-Classes: org.example.HelloResource, org.example.GoodbyeResource

JAX-RS-Alias is the URL prefix that will be used for all resource in this application. JAX-RS-Classes is a comma-separated list of Resource or Provider classes. N.B. these classes do not need to be exported from your bundle, and it is recommended to keep them private.

Example

The following example was adapted from the Jersey Getting Started guide:

package org.example;

import javax.ws.rs.*;

@Path("/helloworld")
public class HelloWorldResource {
	@GET
	@Produces("text/plain")
	public String getMessage() {
		return "Hello world!";
	}
}

Compile this and build into a bundle using Bnd. I recommend using Bndtools.

The Bnd descriptor should look like this:

Private-Package: org.example
JAX-RS-Alias: /example
JAX-RS-Classes: org.example.HelloWorldResource

As an alternative for maintaining the JAX-RS-Classes header, you can use the following Bnd macro. This will expand at build-time to the list of classes in the bundle that are annotated with @Path:

JAX-RS-Classes: ${classes;ANNOTATION;javax.ws.rs.Path}

Deploy to an OSGi runtime containing at least the following bundles:

• An HttpService implementation, e.g. org.apache.felix.http.jetty
• jersey-core-1.4.jar
• jersery-server-1.4.jar
• The extender bundle from this project, i.e. name.njbartlett.osgi.jaxrsextender

You should then be able to open the following URL and see the "Hello world!" message in your browser:

http://localhost:8080/example/helloworld

Licence

This code is distributed under the terms of the Eclipse Public Licence version 1.0.