JSON4Jersey

From APIDesign

Revision as of 12:27, 20 May 2013

The net.java.html.json has been primarily designed to run in a browser. However almost every application in a browser tries to communicate with some server. The application logic is then split into two distinct systems - yet certain parts of the code need to run on both sides (think about validation - prevalidate on client, re-validate on server, before database is modified). Can we use the same code in browser as well as on server?

Jersey Media HTML JSON

A new module has been donated to Jersey version 2.1. Just include it on your own application path as

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.glassfish.jersey.media</groupId>
  <artifactId>html-json</artifactId>
  <version>2.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
  <scope>runtime</scope>
</dependency>

and you can use classes generated by JSON4Brwsr's @Model annotation as Jersey entities. Here is a little demo for you to try:

$ hg clone https://hg.java.net/hg/html~demo
$ cd html~demo/cd chat/server/
$ mvn process-classes exec:java

The (Jersey and Grizzly based) server starts on port 8080. Just open your Chrome browser and point it to http://localhost:8080. In a few seconds, you should see a chat application running via the Bck2Brwsr VM. The message is represented by a Message class and this class is the same on the server as well as in the browser. It is transmitted in a JSON format, but it can also contain additional (for example validation) logic.

Your code can now run on a server as well as get Bck2Brwsr!