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 is self-describing. The client does not require access to persistent Java class definitions.

In REST (Representational State Transfer) terminology,

• Resource : the resources are customizable graph of persistent objects. The object graph is coherent in the sense that if any entity e of the graph has a reference to another entity r, then r is also belongs to the graph.
• Representation: 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.
• Stateless : the life time of any computational resources used by JEST is bound by a single HTTP request-response lifetime.

JEST is further described under the following sections

• JEST Examples
• JEST Representation
• JEST Syntax
• JEST Transaction
• JEST Usage