RESTful Java with JAX-RS

Chapter 15. Workbook Introduction

Reading a book on a new technology gives you a nice foundation to build on, but you cannot truly understand and appreciate a new technology until you see it in action. The following workbook chapters were designed to be a companion to the main chapters of this book. Their goal is to provide step-by-step instructions for installing, configuring, and running various JAX-RS examples found throughout this book with the JBoss RESTEasy framework.

This chapter focuses on downloading and installing RESTEasy and the workbook examples. Following this, each workbook chapter corresponds to a specific chapter in the book. For example, if you are reading Chapter 3 on writing your first JAX-RS service, use Chapter 16 of the workbook to develop and run the examples shown in that chapter with RESTEasy.

This workbook is based on the production release of JBoss RESTEasy JAX-RS 1.2. I picked RESTEasy as the JAX-RS framework for the workbook for no other reason than I am the project lead for it and I know it backward and forward. That said, I took great care to ensure you can easily port the examples to other JAX-RS implementations.

Installing RESTEasy and the Examples

The workbook examples are embedded within the RESTEasy distribution so that as future versions of RESTEasy are released, the workbook examples will be updated along with that release. (I discovered that having a separate download for the workbook examples causes various problems—users can get confused about ...