Spring In Action: Spring REST services vs JAX-RS

[D Tom]

Hi Craig,

I'm developing a single page application using angular.js and it communicates with the server using REST web services. I'm new to spring and wondering if I should use spring REST services or JAX-RS. What are the pros and cons for both?

[Craig Walls]

Either choice is fine, but I'm biased toward Spring MVC for REST. That's because Spring MVC integrates *completely* with the rest of the Spring platform. Many JAX-RS implementations do integrate with Spring, but it's hit-n-miss on how well they integrate.

Certainly, the programming models for Spring MVC and JAX-RS are different, but they're more similar than they are different. Given that I have the richness of the rest of the Spring platform at my disposal, I favor Spring MVC. That said, another valid option is to use Spring Data REST to automatically expose Spring Data repositories as REST APIs...an option that may make sense for a great number of API needs.

D Tom wrote:Hi Craig,

I'm developing a single page application using angular.js and it communicates with the server using REST web services. I'm new to spring and wondering if I should use spring REST services or JAX-RS. What are the pros and cons for both?