How To Publish a WADL with Mule's REST Router Module

It seems to me that Mule's REST Router module, which I've previously blogged about, is gaining popularity as a viable alternative to the Jersey module. Yet, the REST Router has a serious limitation in that it's unable to generate a WADL: the REST equivalent of a WSDL. Recently, I had to overcome this limitation owing to a customer requirement for producing client code from the WADL.

Consider the Mule config below:

The REST Router processes HTTP requests that have a URL path matching the templateURI pattern attribute. Non-matching requests are ignored by the router and passed on to the subsequent message processor which in this case is a static component. Each nested block in the router corresponds to an HTTP method. A GET request is processed by the rest-router:get element, a PUT request is processed by the rest-router:put element, and so on.

WADL generation isn't a feature supported by the REST Router. If I was using the Jersey module in this example, I'd get the service WADL on hitting the URL http://localhost:8081/application.wadl. Although I'd like to avoid using Jersey for various reasons, I could leverage the library's WADL generation feature:

The above modified Mule config routes WADL requests to Jersey and all other requests to the REST Router. Upon receiving a WADL request, Jersey returns the WADL derived from the JAX-RS annotated org.ossandme.CommentResource. CommentResource describes in Java the same RESTful interface described by the REST Router. Since all service logic is performed by the REST Router, I implement the resource as a Java interface instead of a class:

This example is a Maven project hosted on GitHub. To run it, (1) open your console and enter from the project root's directory:

(2) Then deploy the package on Mule 3.3.x standalone runtime. Accessing the URL http://localhost:8081/application.wadl will give you the following:

Posting & Processing JSON with jQuery & Spring MVC

Consider an HTML form containing numerous input fields. When the user clicks on the form's submit button, the fields need to be sent as JSON to a service that under the hood is implemented in Spring MVC.

A jQuery function transforms and posts the form's inputs:

Through the $('form').submit(...) function (line 61), jQuery intercepts any click on the submit button and posts the form with the $.ajax(...) function (line 63). Before sending the data, jQuery transforms the form's inputs to JSON using JSON.stringify($(this).serializeArray()) (line 66). This function outputs a JSON string consisting of a list of key-value pairs:

On the service side, I have the controller to process the form:

getCreateClientForm() returns the HTML form to the user. The more interesting method is processSubmitCreateClient(...).

The headers annotation attribute tells Spring that processSubmitCreateClient(...) should be invoked only if the HTTP request header Content-Type is set to application/json. Furthermore, @RequestBody tells Spring to bind the JSON data to the client paramater which is a list of maps. processSubmitCreateClient(...) iterates through each element to merge the individuals maps into a single map to facilitate processing.

I  added the Jackson library to the project's POM since Spring requires a JSON deserializer to perform the data binding:

You can grab the complete example from GitHub and run it from the project root directory using the following command:

From your browser, enter "http://localhost:8080/jq-springmvc-json/create-client.html" to access the form.