April 12, 2013

Customizing EclipseLink JPA-RS Messages with MOXy

In a previous post I covered how EclipseLink JPA-RS can be used to expose a JPA persistence unit as a RESTful service.  In that example we interacted with the default message formats.  Since JPA-RS leverages MOXy for its XML and JSON binding we can use MOXy to customize the messages.  In this post I will demonstrate how this is done.

Introducing EclipseLink JPA-RS

In a previous series of posts I covered how to create a JAX-RS service that leveraged JPA for the persistence layer.  EclipseLink contains a component called JPA-RS that can be used to easily and automatically expose a persistence unit as RESTful service (that supports XML and JSON messages).  MOXy provides the XML and JSON-binding for JPA-RS and things like bidirectional mappings are automatically mapped for you.  In another post I cover how MOXy can be used to customize the messages shown in this example.

I will use the JPA model that I created in the posts below:

April 10, 2013

MOXy's Object Graphs - Handling Inheritance

In previous posts we have explored how object graphs can be defined through metadata and programatically.  In this post I'll demonstrate the impact of inheritance in your domain model on how you define object graphs.

You can try this out today by downloading an EclipseLink 2.5.0 nightly download starting on March 24, 2013 from:

April 8, 2013

Java API for JSON Processing (JSR-353) - Stream APIs

Java will soon have a standard set of APIs for processing JSON as part of Java EE 7.  This standard is being defined as JSR 353 - Java API for JSON Processing (JSON-P) and it is currently at the Final Approval Ballot.  JSON-P offers both object oriented and stream based approaches, in this post I will introduce the stream APIs.

You can get JSON-P reference implementation from the link below:
UPDATE

JSR-353 has passed the final approval ballot.

April 5, 2013

MOXy and JSON with Padding

JSON with padding is a communication mechanism used in JavaScript to overcome restrictions due to the same origin policy (for more information see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSONP).  In this post I will demonstrate how to leverage JSON with padding when using MOXy as your JSON provider.

This functionality is new in EclipseLink 2.5.0 (and 2.4.2), you can try it out today using a nightly build available from:

April 3, 2013

MOXy's Object Graphs & Dynamic JAXB

JAXB (JSR-222) makes it easy for you to convert instances of your domain classes to/from XML.  The EclipseLink MOXy implementation offers an extension called Dynamic JAXB where instead of real classes you have instances of a map like class called DynamicEntity. You can access the data on your DynamicEntity using get and set methods that take the property name (i.e. customer.get("address") and customer.set('name", "Jane Doe").

In this post, first we will bootstrap a dynamic JAXBContext based on an external mapping file.  Then we unmarshal an XML document to dynamic entities, and finally we will apply an object graph to scope the resulting JSON output.

You can try this out today by downloading an EclipseLink 2.5.0 nightly download starting on March 24, 2013 from: