JEST: REST on OpenJPA

JEST is a REST style access to any OpenJPA runtime.

The salient principles of JEST are:

• non-invasive : Any persistent data managed by OpenJPA can be accessed without any change to POJO classes or to an existing application.
• language-neutral : A client not necessarily Java-based can access persistent data simply by sending an HTTP request. JEST is URI-based as opposed to API-based.
• schema-free : The content and format of the response is controlled by the client.

In REST (Representational State Transfer) terminology,

• the resources are customizable graph of persistent objects.
• the representation of resources are in XML or specialized JSON. JSON is specialized to account for any circular reference in the object graph. However, the JSON representation remains consumable by other standard JSON parsers.
• the life time of any computational resources used by JEST is bound by a single HTTP request-response lifetime.

JEST is described under the following sections

• Using JEST
• URI Syntax of client-server communication
• Representation of persistent state
• Transaction semantics
• Examples