Is JAX-RS suitable as a MVC framework?
jakarta-ee, java, jax-rs, model-view-controller, web-frameworks
Solution
Yes you can, but you have to clear your head of the old page-post model and start to think of your application as a disconnected UI that communicates with a RESTful SOA. When form data is entered, it post to a service endpoint if the data is not correct then you respond back with an error and the UI handles dealing with that error. You do not post forms to the server in the traditional page-post model but rather you make RPC like calls to your back end system. Your view becomes completely detached from the rest of MVC stack. This makes replacing the view with a custom mobile or IVR system extremely simple.
If a user enters wrong or incomplete information in a form, it should be displayed again like with Grails or Wicket. Is there a comfortable way to do this with JAX-RS?
With a rich internet application you do not have to repopulate data because you never left the page, an XHR call is made to the server and either a success 200 is sent back or an error. The UI then decides what to do based on that response, but the page is still intact because the call was out of band from the main UI thread.
Problem
JAX-RS has some MVC support, but I wonder if JAX-RS is really a good choice to build web application for human use. If a user enters wrong or incomplete information in a form, it should be displayed again like with Grails or Wicket. Is there a comfortable way to do this with JAX-RS? As far as I know the URI mapping doesn't work correctly, if not all required parameters are given or there are type conversion problems (with Date for example). Is that correct? Is there support for internationalized templates? Here is an example for a simple JAX-RS based GUI application. But it is really simple and thing like i18n and validation are not discussed.