Building GWT web clients [Part 2] – How to expose REST-full JAX-RS service with Jersey on Tomcat server?

In the previous article (Part 1) we’ve seen how to create a web-based REST-full client (and an appropriate server) by using GWT. GWT is not providing any “standard” REST (if you can use this word in REST context at all) interface, but, merely, exposes the server-side logic via a proprietary GWT RPC interface.

Today, the most common REST standard is the JAX-RS specification. By implementing your code along the JAX-RS guidelines you can be rest assured that you can easily switch one REST-RX library with another.

As of today there are a couple of JAX-RS libraries used by the Java community:

1. Jersey
2. Restlet
3. Portlet
4. etc…

On the other hand, being a big fan of Spring, I was hoping that Spring will provide the JAX-RS support in it’s Spring v3 release, but, looking at the M3 drop, I have realized that it’s nowhere near that promise (check my discussion on the StackOverflow).

For this post I’m going to use Jersey JAX-RS implementation. Let’s start with creating

Deploying GWT applications on Tomcat

If you’re looking for some guidance about deploying GWT applications on Tomcat, I found these articles helpful:

1. Deploy Google Web Toolkit(GWT) Applications using Tomcat
2. gwt-examples – tomcat6 Documentation