whats the jersey analog for spring (boot) data's @Repository

Question

ive been tasked with a total refactor of legacy code. It's a simple webservice, just an http request, then business logic with possibly a few database calls and a few other microservice calls, then a json response. I am being pushed not to use spring boot because no one else around me has used it before, and I was told jersey does everything spring boot does. I've never used jersey so im trying to find out how to do things that spring boot makes simple (ie repository layer with spring-data, caching, spring-consul, spring-zuul, spring-actuator, spring-circuit-breaker) It looks like jersey does do an analog of spring-security, bean validation, and easy insertion of servlet filters, but not everything spring-boot does. Is there an easy way to wire in a JPA type repository in jersey? I cant find it in the docs at https://jersey.java.net/documentation/latest/index.html.

Answer 1

I think about it this way. There are different layers in your application. You have a service layer, and you have a "REST layer". You access the Spring repositories with the service layer. Then you have the REST layer. With Spring, you have Spring MVC which is its web layer implementation, that you can also use as REST services. There is also Jersey, which is completely independent of Spring, which is a another REST layer options.

That be said, when using Spring MVC as the REST layer, adding the service layer with Spring data is seamless. But Jersey also has integration with Spring, that allows us to use Spring at the service layer inside our Jersey REST services. You check out this post which has some links to example of how this can be done (no hacking, this is supported out of the box). Using this approach, you can just injector your Spring data repositories into your Jersey resource class

interface PetsRepository extends JpaRepository<Pets, Long> {}

@Path("/pets")
class PetsResource {
  @Autowired
  private PetsRepository repo;
}

Now lets talk about Spring Boot. Spring Boot is just a bootstrapping framework. What it does is allow you to easily bootstrap an application without all the boilerplate configuration you would need without it. When your using Spring Boot for your REST services, you're not actually using Spring Boot itself as the REST service engine. You are only using it to bootstrap Spring MVC and maybe your Spring Data. But Spring MVC is the actual REST service engine.

Now like I said before, Jersey has support for integrating Spring into into it (for the service layer). Because of this support, Spring Boot has also provided a bootstrap configuration to integrate this support seamlessly. So instead of using the manual configuration that you would see in one of the examples linked to above, Spring Boot handles this configuration for us. So we can use Jersey as the REST layer, and Spring beans as the service layer. Check out the links below

See also:

• Spring Boot docs for Jersey support