JAX-RS and Jersey

If you prefer the JAX-RS programming model for REST endpoints, you can use one of the available implementations instead of Spring MVC. Jersey and Apache CXF work quite well out of the box. CXF requires you to register its Servlet or Filter as a @Bean in your application context. Jersey has some native Spring support, so we also provide auto-configuration support for it in Spring Boot, together with a starter.

To get started with Jersey, include the spring-boot-starter-jersey as a dependency and then you need one @Bean of type ResourceConfig in which you register all the endpoints, as shown in the following example:

import org.glassfish.jersey.server.ResourceConfig;

import org.springframework.stereotype.Component;

@Component
public class MyJerseyConfig extends ResourceConfig {

	public MyJerseyConfig() {
		register(MyEndpoint.class);
	}

}

Jersey’s support for scanning executable archives is rather limited. For example, it cannot scan for endpoints in a package found in a fully executable jar file or in WEB-INF/classes when running an executable war file. To avoid this limitation, the packages method should not be used, and endpoints should be registered individually by using the register method, as shown in the preceding example.

For more advanced customizations, you can also register an arbitrary number of beans that implement ResourceConfigCustomizer.

All the registered endpoints should be @Components with HTTP resource annotations (@GET and others), as shown in the following example:

import jakarta.ws.rs.GET;
import jakarta.ws.rs.Path;

import org.springframework.stereotype.Component;

@Component
@Path("/hello")
public class MyEndpoint {

	@GET
	public String message() {
		return "Hello";
	}

}

Since the Endpoint is a Spring @Component, its lifecycle is managed by Spring and you can use the @Autowired annotation to inject dependencies and use the @Value annotation to inject external configuration. By default, the Jersey servlet is registered and mapped to /*. You can change the mapping by adding @ApplicationPath to your ResourceConfig.

By default, Jersey is set up as a servlet in a @Bean of type ServletRegistrationBean named jerseyServletRegistration. By default, the servlet is initialized lazily, but you can customize that behavior by setting spring.jersey.servlet.load-on-startup. You can disable or override that bean by creating one of your own with the same name. You can also use a filter instead of a servlet by setting spring.jersey.type=filter (in which case, the @Bean to replace or override is jerseyFilterRegistration). The filter has an @Order, which you can set with spring.jersey.filter.order. When using Jersey as a filter, a servlet that will handle any requests that are not intercepted by Jersey must be present. If your application does not contain such a servlet, you may want to enable the default servlet by setting server.servlet.register-default-servlet to true. Both the servlet and the filter registrations can be given init parameters by using spring.jersey.init.* to specify a map of properties.