Jakarta RESTful Web Services, (JAX-RS; formerly Java API for RESTful Web Services) is a Jakarta EE API specification that provides support in creating web services according to the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural pattern. JAX-RS uses annotations, introduced in Java SE 5, to simplify the development and deployment of web service clients and endpoints. From version 1.1 on, JAX-RS is an official part of Java EE 6. A notable feature of being an official part of Java EE is that no configuration is necessary to start using JAX-RS. For non-Java EE 6 environments a small entry in the web.xml deployment descriptor is required.

Specification

JAX-RS provides some annotations to aid in mapping a resource class (a POJO) as a web resource. The annotations use the Java package (previously was but was renamed on May 19, 2019 ). They include: In addition, it provides further annotations to method parameters to pull information out of the request. All the annotations take a key of some form which is used to look up the value required.

JAX-RS 2.0

In January 2011 the JCP formed the JSR 339 expert group to work on JAX-RS 2.0. The main targets are (among others) a common client API and support for Hypermedia following the HATEOAS-principle of REST. In May 2013, it reached the Final Release stage. On 2017-08-22 JAX-RS 2.1 specification final release was published. Main new supported features include server-sent events, reactive clients, and JSON-B.

Implementations

Implementations of JAX-RS include:

Tutorials