Oracle is banking on REST and JSON to modernize Java EE for microservices and the cloud.
It may seem like ages since REST stole thunder from SOAP as a mechanism for providing web services communications. REST, in conjunction with JSON and HTTP, proved a far simpler means for delivering web services than SOAP, which has long been criticized for complexity.
Fast-forward to the present, and Oracle is now positioning REST and JSON as critical cogs in its Java EE upgrade plans. The company began retooling Java EE for microservices and cloud platforms last year , after community protests that Oracle had been neglecting the enterprise platform. The initial result of those plans, Java EE 8, is due this October.
“When people are building microservices nowadays, they do tend to be REST-based, so that tends to be focused around JAX-RS [Java API for RESTful Web Services], which is a key spec that is being upgraded,” Oracle’s Mike Lehman, vice president of product management, says.
This upgraded spec, JAX-RS 2.1, will focus on a range of capabilities, including Server-Sent Events (SSE) and integrations with JSON-B and Contexts and Dependency Injection (CDI). Java EE 8 will feature JAX-RS 2.1, thereby facilitating REST communications, which Lehman says is the typical method coarse-grained microservices communicate with one another, almost by default.
A former Oracle Java EE evangelist who has remained a pro-EE activist is on board with REST as an anchor for microservices.
“REST is indeed a key part of most microservices,” says Reza Rahman, who heads up Java Guardians, a Java EE interest group , and works as a senior architect at consultant CapTech.
