How to Integrate Jersey in a Spring MVC Application

I have recently started to build a public REST API with Java for Podcastpedia.org and for the JAX-RS implementation I have chosen Jersey, as I find it “natural” and powerful – you can find out more about it by following the Tutorial – REST API design and implementation in Java with Jersey and Spring. Because Podcastpedia.org is a web application powered by Spring MVC, I wanted to integrate both frameworks in podcastpedia-web, to take advantage of the backend service functionality already present in the project. Anyway this short post will present the steps I had to take to make the integration between the two frameworks work.

Framework versions

Current versions used:

<properties>
	<spring.version>4.1.0.RELEASE</spring.version>
	<jersey.version>2.14</jersey.version>
</properties>

Project dependencies

The Jersey Spring extension must be present in your project’s classpath. If you are using Maven add it to the pom.xml file of your project:

<!-- Jersey-Spring http://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.glassfish.jersey.ext/jersey-spring3/2.4.1 -->
<dependency>
	<groupId>org.glassfish.jersey.ext</groupId>
	<artifactId>jersey-spring3</artifactId>
	<version>${jersey.version}</version>
	<exclusions>
		<exclusion>
			<groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
			<artifactId>spring-core</artifactId>
		</exclusion>
		<exclusion>
			<groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
			<artifactId>spring-web</artifactId>
		</exclusion>
		<exclusion>
			<groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
			<artifactId>spring-beans</artifactId>
		</exclusion>
	</exclusions>
</dependency>
<dependency>
	<groupId>org.glassfish.jersey.media</groupId>
	<artifactId>jersey-media-json-jackson</artifactId>
	<version>${jersey.version}</version>
	<exclusions>
		<exclusion>
			<groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.jaxrs</groupId>
			<artifactId>jackson-jaxrs-base</artifactId>
		</exclusion>		
		<exclusion>
			<groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.core</groupId>
			<artifactId>jackson-annotations</artifactId>
		</exclusion>
		<exclusion>
			<groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.jaxrs</groupId>
			<artifactId>jackson-jaxrs-json-provider</artifactId>
		</exclusion>        					
	</exclusions>
</dependency>

Note: I have explicitly excluded the Spring core and the Jackson implementation libraries as they have been already imported in the project with preferred versions.

Web.xml  configuration

In the web.xml, in addition  to the Spring MVC servlet configuration I added the jersey-servlet configuration, that will map all requests starting with/api/:

<servlet>
	<servlet-name>Spring MVC Dispatcher Servlet</servlet-name>
	<servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
	
	<init-param>
		<param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
		<param-value>
			classpath:spring/application-context.xml	   			
		</param-value>
	</init-param>
	<load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>		
<servlet-mapping>
	<servlet-name>Spring MVC Dispatcher Servlet</servlet-name>
	<url-pattern>/</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

<servlet>
	<servlet-name>jersey-serlvet</servlet-name>
	<servlet-class>
		org.glassfish.jersey.servlet.ServletContainer
	</servlet-class>
	<init-param>
		<param-name>javax.ws.rs.Application</param-name>
		<param-value>org.podcastpedia.web.api.JaxRsApplication</param-value>			
	</init-param>		
	<load-on-startup>2</load-on-startup>
</servlet>
<servlet-mapping>
	<servlet-name>jersey-serlvet</servlet-name>
	<url-pattern>/api/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>	

Well, that’s pretty much it… If you have any questions drop me a line or comment in the discussion below.

In the coming post I will present some of the results of this integration, by showing how to call one method of the REST public API with jQuery, to dynamically load recent episodes of a podcast, so stay tuned.