Writing your first REST service

In the following sections, we are going to create our first REST service. Creating a REST service in JAX-RS requires the following two steps:

1. Writing a resource class: A class where we will write our web services methods
2. Configuring Jersey for our project: Telling the application server to load Jersey, and referencing the resource class we will be creating

Writing a resource class

A resource class is the primary building block of RESTful services in JAX-RS. It's a POJO that includes one or more resource methods. Each resource method represents a RESTful service that can be called using one of the main core HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, or DELETE).

In order to create a resource class, you will add the @Path annotation to your POJO. The annotation is passed a relative URI that represents the URL of your RESTful service. You will introduce one or more method, annotated with one of the method designator annotations (@GET,@POST,@PUT, or@DELETE).

Let's see an example...