Restful service with JAX RS and CDI on Glassfish

I was working on a RESTful service with JAX RS on Glassfish and pieced together a working implementation with CDI dependency injection.

	import javax.annotation.ManagedBean;
	import javax.inject.Inject;
	import javax.ws.rs.GET;
	import javax.ws.rs.Path;
	import javax.ws.rs.Produces;
	import javax.ws.rs.QueryParam;
	import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlRootElement;

	/**
	* JAX RS implementation of REST logfile service.
	* @author Koert Zeilstra
	*/
	@Path("/test")
	@ManagedBean
	public class TestService {

	@Inject
	private HelloRepository helloRepository;

	@GET
	@Path("/hello")
	@Produces({"application/xml", "application/json"})
	public Greeting test(@QueryParam(value = "name") String name) {
	Greeting greeting = new Greeting();
	greeting.message = helloRepository.getGreeting(name);
	return greeting;
	}

	@XmlRootElement(name = "greeting")
	public static class Greeting {
	public String message;
	}
	}

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TestService.java

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This REST service is pretty simple, when you access /test/hello?name=John with a GET, you will get “Hello world John” back. Note the @ManagedBean annotation – this will make CDI dependency injection working in a JAX RS instantiated service.

The HelloRepository is injected with CDI:

	/**
	* Example repository.
	* @author Koert Zeilstra
	*/
	public class HelloRepository {
	/**
	* @return Example greeting.
	*/
	public String getGreeting(String name) {
	return "Hello world " + name;
	}
	}

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HelloRepository.java

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You can package this as a WAR file and deploy it on a Glassfish server. To make this work, you need a minimal web.xml in WEB-INF:

	<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
	<web-app version="3.0" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
	xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
	xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_3_0.xsd">
	<display-name>test-service</display-name>
	</web-app>

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minimal-web.xml

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To enable CDI, you need an empty beans.xml in WEB-INF:

	<beans xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
	xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
	xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/beans_1_0.xsd">
	</beans>

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minimal-beans.xml

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And to make JAX RS working correctly and set the root path, you need this class:

	import javax.ws.rs.ApplicationPath;
	import javax.ws.rs.core.Application;
	/**
	* Application configuration.
	* See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23508159/jax-rs-glassfish-eclipse-a-simple-web-service-doesnt-work
	* @author Koert Zeilstra
	*/
	@ApplicationPath("/")
	public class TestServiceApplication extends Application {
	}

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TestServiceApplication.java

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To set the context root, you could also add a glassfish-web.xml in WEB-INF – this is of course Glassfish specific.

After figuring this out, it is easy to configure and doesn’t need any complicated XML. I got the above configuration working on Glassfish 3 and 4.