Ruby/Rails URI Patterns and JSR311

I had been working with a rails project mapping a uniform REST interace onto complex resource representations assembled at runtime, and as such no object/relational mapping was used to pull information from a local datasource.  Instead I use ‘virtual’ resource representations which are fulfilled on-demand, within synch or asynch interactions, from back-end complex back-end data sources and interfaces.

As such the primary Rails convention of mapping resource URI’s to controllers and actions, and through an object/relational layer to a datasource is effectively useless in my scenario. Instead of mapping resource to a datasource, I instead have to  map URI’s to a generic controller, still supporting the GET, POST, PUT, DELETE semantics, but essentially data-driving a dynamic integration tier with the resource context.

So if I were resource-enabling a database with  2 tables, customers and orders, then I’d use the following routes.rb entries (along with a rails resource scaffold) to build my URI to datasource relationships.

map.resources :customers
map.resources :orders

This would route requests for http://domain:port/customers to the Customers controller, and route the http://domain:port/orders to the Orders controller, where each would sit across O/R mappings to specific tables in my database. Nice and easy !

However in my world the Customers resource and the Orders resource are virtual within the front-end runtime, and must be instantiated by using a dynamic mapping algorithm to initiate back-end integration transactions over a range of mechanisms to instantiate the correct representations for each resource type (focusing on GETS’s for this sake of this example). As such it makes  sense for me to have a single VirtualResource Controller, which uses request context information to infer the correct representation algorithm. Rails has a neat way of enabling this in the routing table:

map.resources :operations, :controller=>"virtualresources"
map.resources :customers, :controller=>"virtualresources"

This enables me to pipe a range of URI patterns into my virtual handler and manage a lot of complexity through very few generalised routines.

At this point I’m considering the migration across to Jersey on Glassfish – using the JSR311 annotation scheme for this kind of URI pattern matching.

 @UriTemplate("widgets/{id}")
 public class Widget {
 ...
 }


Only problem is – at the moment I see no way of assigning multiple URI patterns to a single Virtual Resource class in the way I have with Rails. Only one URI pattern is enabled for each POJO class – which would mean I’d have to create many proxy classes into my virtual resource handler? I’m gonna have to dig a little deeper here but hope this kind of flexibility and learning from the Rails community will be factored into the JSR spec?