In this article, I will be covering the differences between JAX-RS/Jersey and Spring REST.
REST stands for Representational State Transfer. It is an architectural style that can be used for web services. A REST server exposes functionality as REST endpoints which are simply URLs. A REST client simply uses the services exposed by the REST server by accessing the corresponding URL.
JAX-RS stands for Java API for RESTful Web Services (JAX-RS). It is the standard Java API for developing RESTful web services. The latest version of JAX-RS is JAX-RS 2.0. It is part of Java EE 7, so it does not need to be included separately. It is just a specification, it does not provide an implementation. Jersey is the reference implementation of JAX-RS specification. There are other implementations of JAX-RS like RESTEasy, etc
The Spring framework also provides REST support. The Spring MVC module can be used to develop a REST service. It defines several annotations that you can use to develop a REST application.
Although both JAX-RS and Spring REST can be used to create a RESTful service in Java, there are several differences between the two as follows:
| Jax-rs | Spring REST |
|---|---|
| JAX-RS is the standard Java specification for RESTful web services | Spring REST is an alternate way of writing REST services in Java, it does not implement JAX-RS |
| JAX-RS is just a specification, you will need to include an implementation like Jersey in order to write REST services | Spring REST is the complete implementation for RESTful services by Spring. It can be used by itself. It does not implement JAX-RS |
| JAX-RS uses standard annotations that are part of Java EE | Spring REST uses its own custom annotations for REST |
| Jax-rs | Spring REST | Use of Annotation |
|---|---|---|
| @Get | @RequestMapping, @GetMapping | Used to specify that the method maps to an HTTP GET method |
| @Post | @RequestMapping, @PostMapping | Used to specify that the method maps to an HTTP POST method |
| @Path | @RequestMapping | Used to specify The URI that the method or class maps to |
| @QueryParam | @RequestParam | Used to specify a query parameter |
| @PathParam | @PathVariable | Used to specify a path parameter |
Spring MasterClass Spring Tutorial For Beginners Step by Step Spring MVC Tutorial Spring Framework in Easy Steps Developing RESTful web services using JAX-RS and Jersey
In this article, I provided a comparison between JAX-RS and Spring REST. I hope this article was useful in understanding the differences between Spring REST and JAX-RS.