JAX-RS with embedded server

Question

Clarification: this question was about GZIPping an JAX-WS-based REST service, but I\'ve decided to change the topic to make it easier to find

Answer 1

gzipping the output is the reponsibility of JAX WS implementation. You should refer to server's (Tomcat, Glassfish, JBoss, etc) documentation in order to configure your http network listeners.

Answer 2

If using CXF for your JAX-WS implementation (or JAX-RS), you could just add @GZIP annotation onto the service class.

Answer 3

If you really want to do REST with Java I would suggest you to to use a JAX-RS implementation (RESTeasy, Jersey...).

If your main concern is the dependency on a servlet container, you could use the JAX-RS RuntimeDelegate to register your application as a JAX-RS endpoint.

// Using grizzly as the underlaying server
SelectorThread st = RuntimeDelegate.createEndpoint(new MyApplication(), SelectorThread.class);

st.startEndpoint();

// Wait...
st.stopEndpoint();

Concerning GZIP encoding, each JAX-RS provider has different approaches. Jersey provides a filter to accomplish the encoding transparently. RESTEasy provides an annotation for that.

EDIT

I did some small tests. The following two things will definitely work for you, assuming you are using Maven.

Using Jersey + SimpleServer:

    public static void main( String[] args ) throws Exception {

    java.io.Closeable server = null;

    try {
        // Creates a server and listens on the address below.
        // Scans classpath for JAX-RS resources
        server = SimpleServerFactory.create("http://localhost:5555");
        System.out.println("Press any key to stop the service...");
        System.in.read();
    } finally {
        try {
            if (server != null) {
                server.close();
            }
        } finally {
            ;
        }
    }
}

with maven dependencies

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.sun.jersey</groupId>
    <artifactId>jersey-core</artifactId>
    <version>1.10</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.sun.jersey.contribs</groupId>
    <artifactId>jersey-simple-server</artifactId>
    <version>1.10</version>
</dependency>

Or using the Jersey + Grizzly2:

public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {

    HttpServer server = null;

    try {
        server = GrizzlyServerFactory.createHttpServer("http://localhost:5555");
        System.out.println("Press any key to stop the service...");
        System.in.read();
    } finally {
        try {
            if (server != null) {
                server.stop();
            }
        } finally {
            ;
        }
    }
}

with maven dependencies

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.sun.jersey</groupId>
    <artifactId>jersey-core</artifactId>
    <version>1.10</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.sun.jersey</groupId>
    <artifactId>jersey-grizzly2</artifactId>
    <version>1.10</version>
</dependency>

Honestly speaking I was not able to get the RuntimeDelegate sample working, too. There certainly is a way to start RESTEasy out of the box, too but I cannot recall it at the moment.