The Jersey client API is a high-level Java based API for interoperating with RESTful Web services. It makes it very easy to interoperate with RESTful Web services and enables a developer to concisely and efficiently implement a reusable client-side solution that leverages existing and well established client-side HTTP implementations.
The Jersey client API can be utilized to interoperate with any RESTful Web service, implemented using one of many frameworks, and is not restricted to services implemented using JAX-RS. However, developers familiar with JAX-RS should find the Jersey client API complementary to their services, especially if the client API is utilized by those services themselves, or to test those services.
The goals of the Jersey client API are threefold:
- Encapsulate a key constraint of the REST architectural style, namely the Uniform Interface Constraint and associated data elements, as client-side Java artifacts;
- Make it as easy to interoperate with RESTful Web services as JAX-RS makes it easy to build RESTful Web services; and
- Leverage artifacts of the JAX-RS API for the client side. Note that JAX-RS is currently a server-side only API.
The Jersey Client API supports a pluggable architecture to enable the use of different underlying HTTP client implementations. Two such implementations are supported and leveraged: the Http(s)URLConnection classes supplied with the JDK; and the Apache HTTP client.
The uniform interface constraint bounds the architecture of RESTful Web services so that a client, such as a browser, can utilize the same interface to communicate with any service. This is a very powerful concept in software engineering that makes Web-based search engines and service mash-ups possible. It induces properties such as:
- simplicity, the architecture is easier to understand and maintain; and
- modifiability or loose coupling, clients and services can evolve over time perhaps in new and unexpected ways, while retaining backwards compatibility.
Further constraints are required:
- every resource is identified by a URI;
- a client interacts with the resource via HTTP requests and responses using a fixed set of HTTP methods;
- one or more representations can be retured and are identified by media types; and
- the contents of which can link to further resources.
The above process repeated over and again should be familiar to anyone who has used a browser to fill in HTML forms and follow links. That same process is applicable to non-browser based clients.
Many existing Java-based client APIs, such as the Apache HTTP client API or java.net.HttpURLConnection supplied with the JDK place too much focus on the Client-Server constraint for the exchanges of request and responses rather than a resource, identified by a URI, and the use of a fixed set of HTTP methods.
A resource in the Jersey client API is an instance of the Java class WebResource, and encapsulates a URI. The fixed set of HTTP methods are methods on WebResource or if using the builder pattern (more on this later) are the last methods to be called when invoking an HTTP method on a resource. The representations are Java types, instances of which, may contain links that new instances of WebResource may be created from.