I’m porting an existing application RESTful API to a Java web framework — I don’t actually care which — but it’s proving hard to get the basics right.
The core of the problem appears to be getting the bridge between JAX-RS and the database so that transactions work. The API uses subresources a lot, and the way JAX-RS appears to work involves returning a new locator. Now that’s a nice pattern, but it means there is nowhere that makes an effective bound on the transaction, so the @Transactional annotations become a problem. I’d really like them to be scoped to the request somehow, but none of the frameworks I’ve tried seem to make that easy, or even possible.
It’s a kind of a three body problem. I can do transactions and queries fine by pushing them into a repository layer, but then I’d have to not use subresources. Or I can do subresources and even queries nicely but then there is nowhere nice for the transactions to happen. Basically I can have any two of transactions, subresources, and complex queries, but I need all three.
So far, I’ve tried to get this working with Guice + Jersey + Querydsl, and with Spring Data and Spring REST. They all seem entirely based on the idea that each endpoint can be @Transactional, and (usually) that it is a simple CRUD API on tables. I have a very nice front end already built. and I can’t see any good reason to totally rewrite it because Java makes the services awkward to build.
I know somehow I need to get the transactions tied to the request, and use DTOs anyway so I’m happy with that, but I can’t find any way to make that happen. Does anybody have any useful pointers, templates, advice?