How to deploy a JAX-RS application?

Question

The JAX-RS 1.1 specification says on page 6:

If no Application subclass is present the added servlet MUST be named:

javax.ws.rs.core         


        

Answer 1

There are a number of options for deploying into a Java EE 6 container (more specifically a Servlet 3.0 implementation):

The simplest is:

    
        javax.ws.rs.core.Application
        1
    
    
        javax.ws.rs.core.Application
        /rest/*
    

Then all the @Path and @Provider classes found in your web application will be available in the "default" JAX-RS application with a servlet URL pattern of "/rest/*".

If you have one or more classes that extends javax.ws.rs.core.Application, you can specify like so:

    
        com.example.jaxrs.MyApplication
        1
    
    
        com.example.jaxrs.MyApplication
        /rest/*
    

You may want to do the above in case you wish to only return specific sets of @Path/@Provider classes on a URL (so you could have a second MyApplication2 with a different URL pattern above).

You can also skip the whole web.xml altogether and just annotate your MyApplication class wih @ApplicationPath which will serve as the URL pattern. I would recommend keeping the web.xml in any case because you will probably have to add other information about the web application there anyway.

If you're wondering where the servlet-class comes from, it is automatically added in by the environment. You can get an idea by looking at the Servlet 3.0 ServletContext.