Feedback requested: Integrating Jersey 2 and Akka

[Paul O'Fallon]

Hello!  I've been working on a project which delivers an asynchronous implementation of a REST API in Java using Tomcat 7, Jersey 2 and Akka.  Being neither an expert in Jersey nor Akka, I spent a tremendous amount of time figuring out how to integrate the two (specifically how to instantiate an ActorSystem at server startup and inject it into each service request).  I've created a sample project that demonstrates my approach:

https://github.com/pofallon/jersey2-akka-java

(The "magic" is in the constructor of the ExampleApplication class)

That all being said, I'm in the process of writing a blog entry chronicling my experiences in which I'll highlight the above github project.  Before I publish it, I'd be interested in any feedback on the sample from folks more experienced in Akka than myself.  Is this a reasonable way to integrate the two?  Anything you would do differently? (knowing that it has to be Tomcat and Jersey... :-)

Thanks in advance!

- Paul

[Rafał Krzewski]

Hello Paul,

an alternative approach would be spawning a short-lived helper actor for each request, passing AsyncResponse to it in it's Props. The helper actor would then send a message to the actual worker actor, and once reply message arrives, complete the response and terminate itself. ActorContext.setReceiveTimeout should be used to ensure that the helper actor does not hang around indefinitely, but completes the response with an error in case the worker actor does not respond. 

Cheers,

Rafał

[Paul O'Fallon]

Hello Rafał -- thank you for the feedback!  In my "real world" implementation, I am indeed creating a short lived actor (but I was afraid that was an anti-pattern so I didn't include it here).  However, the passing via Props and setReceiveTimeout are new to me so I'll look into those further and possibly add them to the github project as well.

Thanks again!

- Paul

[Rishi K]

Hi Paul,

Do you have any working example of rest+akka+jersey using java 6. I saw your example which uses Java 7. Some how i could not able to run the DoublerTest it gives NPE something needs to be configured on my env. I am kind of stuck on making it to work for java 6. Thanks

[Paul O'Fallon]

Hello!  Apparently as of Jersey 2.7, Java 6 is no longer supported (see here:  https://jersey.java.net/release-notes/2.7.html).  If you change the POM in the project to use Jersey 2.6 (and Java 6) the project will run -- but the tests won't work (the test container still requires Java 7).

- Paul

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[Rishi K]

Thank you Paul. The test container sending sync request?