RESTful on Play! framework

Question

We are planning a project primarily serving content to mobile apps, but need to have a website.

My question is whether is makes sense to use Jersey or Restlet to dev

Answer 1

Use Play! to do it all. Writing REST services in Play is very very easy.

Firstly, the routes file makes it straightforward to write routes that conform to the REST approach.

Then, you write your actions, in the controller, for each API method you want to create.

Depending on how you want to return the result (XML, JSON etc), there are a few methods you can use. For example, using the renderJSON method, allows the results to be rendered very easily. If you want to render XML, then you can just do so in the same way as you would build an HTML document in your View.

Here is a neat example.

routes file

GET     /user/{id}            Application.getUser(format:'xml')
GET     /user/{id}/json       Application.getUserJSON
POST    /user/                Application.createUser
PUT     /user/{id}            Application.updateUser
DELETE  /user/{id}            Application.deleteUser

Application file

public static void createUser(User newUser) {
    newUser.save();
    renderText("success");
}

public static void updateUser(Long id, User user) {
    User dbUser = User.findById(id);
    dbUser.updateDetails(user); // some model logic you would write to do a safe merge
    dbUser.save();
    renderText("success");
}

public static void deleteUser(Long id) {
    // first check authority
    User.findById(id).delete();
    renderText("success");
}

public static void getUser(Long id)  {
    User user = User.findById(id)
    renderJSON(user);
}

public static void getUserJSON(Long id) {
    User user = User.findById(id)
    renderJSON(user);
}

getUser.xml file

   ${user.name}
   ${user.dob}
   .... etc etc