Wednesday, September 23, 2009

New release of JSR 311 plugin for Grails

It's about two weeks ago that the latest version (0.2) of the JSR 311 plugin for Grails (grails-jaxrs) has been released. In contrast to the first release (0.1) , which was mainly a proof-of-concept, this new release focused, among other things, on a closer Grails integration. In particular
  • JAX-RS classes like resource classes and entity providers are now auto-detected by the plugin. There's no need any more to add them to the Spring application context manually.
  • JAX-RS classes managed by the plugin can be changed at runtime in development mode. Code changes are detected by the plugin and reloaded in the same way as Grails controllers or services are.
Antoher enhancement in this version is support for deployments on the Google App Engine (GAE). This required to support Restlet as JAX-RS implementation in addition to Jersey. In contrast to Jersey, Restlet can be deployed to GAE and since version 2.0-m4 its JAX-RS extension as well. For a running example go to http://grails-jaxrs.appspot.com/test?name=World. Please note that initializing Grails applications on GAE can take very long (up tp 30 seconds) at the moment. Subsequent requests are served much faster, of course.

Also the documentation has been and extended and completely revised. The easiest way to get started with the plugin is the Getting Started guide.