Jersey Client API – made for each other

In my earlier blog entry on Jersey, I used HTTPClient API and curl command line utility as the clients. I had not mentioned about the Jersey Client API. It is part of the Jersey distribution. I would prefer using Jersey Client API as it is modeled around the concepts of JAX-RS spec. Let us quickly re-write our client using the Jersey API and see how easy is to write a client in Java.

import com.sun.jersey.api.client.Client;
import com.sun.jersey.api.client.WebResource;
import restful.impl.jaxb.MovieCollection;
import restful.impl.jaxb.MovieDetails;

import static java.lang.System.out;

public class JerseyClient {
    public static void main(String args[]) {
        Client client = Client.create();
        WebResource r = client.resource("http://localhost:9090/boxoffice/movies");
        MovieCollection movies = r.accept("application/xml").get(MovieCollection.class);
        for (MovieDetails movie : movies.getMovie()) {
            out.println("Title : " + movie.getTitle());
            out.println("Genres : " + movie.getGenres());
            out.println("Directed By : " + movie.getDirectedBy());
            out.println("Rank : " + movie.getRank());
        }        
    }
}

This program will print all the top box office movie details in the console. I will be discussing more about this client API in future posts.

The Jersey user forum is the first place to check for any Jersey related issues. The Jersey team is amazingly helpful in resolving any issues. You can also visit Paul’s blog here, Marc’s blog here and Jakub’s blog here. You can bookmark these blogs as they are really informative. Grab the Jersey team’s JavaOne 2008 presentation slide deck here.

You can download the NetBeans project for this sample movie application here.