Introduction I’ve built a small example of running a standalone Java application that both serves static HTML, JavaScript, CSS content, and also publishes a REST web service. The example uses Jersey and Jetty. This example probably deserves a few posts to allow enough time to explain how the pieces fit together, so I’ll start with the primary Java pieces that make a JAX-RS application. A couple years back, while I was working through some slides to teach a Java class (mostly Java EE and Spring) I created a REST web service using Spring WebMVC.

Previous posts such as this one have shown using embedded Jetty to REST-enable a standalone Java program. Those posts were lacking an important feature for real applications: packaging into a JAR so the application will run outside of Eclipse and won’t be dependent on Maven and jetty:run. To make this happen, we will use Maven to build an executable JAR that also includes all of the Jetty and Spring dependencies we need.

Introduction I’ve talked before about Jetty as an embedded servlet container. Jetty also includes some useful utility servlet implementations, one of which is ProxyServlet. ProxyServlet is a way to create an HTTP or HTTP/S proxy in very few lines of code. Even though it’s part of the Jetty project, it’s modularized to be independent of the Jetty server, so you can use it even in cases where the servlet won’t be run in Jetty.

As I discussed in a series of four posts (see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4), I recently taught a class on Spring WebMVC and how it can be used to REST-enable a standalone Java application. As part of that discussion, I talked about using Jetty as an embedded servlet container, which let us create and access servlets without having to package our existing application as a WAR.

This post is part 3 of a series that started here and continued here. There will be at least one more post in this series, to discuss Spring WebMVC as a client. All of the code is available as a project on GitHub. As I discussed previously, the Spring WebMVC example I provided is a complete web application, with the three files web.xml, rest-servlet.xml, and the controller class. But one of the reasons I wanted to put together this example is to show the class I was teaching the possibility of embedding this into an existing Java program.