Deploying RestEasy in Tomcat 6.0

Since I was successful deploying Jersey to Tomcat 6.0, I decided to check out RestEasy from JBoss. One issue I ran into with Jersey was it's inability to XML serialize a collection of objects. This is bug ID is 18, and it is fixed for the 1.0 release (however a beta of this does not appear to be available yet), but I decided to see if RestEasy (a non-reference implementation) has the same issue.

UPDATE I have discovered from some testing that neither XML nor JSON is currently supported as a return type for a Collection/List of items. An issue has been filed for RestEasy for JSON (RESTEASY-134) with an RC1 delivery, however I did not see one for XML.

Here are the steps I used to get this working:

1. Download RestEasy from the JBoss website: http://www.jboss.org/resteasy/
2. Follow the steps 2 to 4 of my previous blog Deploying Jersey in Tomcat 6.0
3. Download and create a Eclipse library for JavaAssist. Include this in your WEB project (or provide the javaassist.jar for Tomcat)
4. Create a new RestEasy library in eclipse which contains the content of the rest easy installation lib location. You can probably skip a few of the jars if you do not need all the functionality (such as jyaml.jar and possibly mail.jar)
5. Modify your web.xml for your project to include the following (this comes right from the sample web.xml in the rest easy install):

   
   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
   <web-app xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee" xmlns:web="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd" xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd" id="WebApp_ID" version="2.5">
     <display-name>TestWeb</display-name>
     <welcome-file-list>
       <welcome-file>index.html</welcome-file>
     </welcome-file-list>
     
     <context-param>
         <param-name>resteasy.scan</param-name>
         <param-value>true</param-value>
      </context-param>
   
      <!-- set this if you map the Resteasy servlet to something other than /*
      <context-param>
         <param-name>resteasy.servlet.mapping.prefix</param-name>
         <param-value>/resteasy</param-value>
      </context-param>
      -->
      <!-- if you are using Spring, Seam or EJB as your component model, remove the ResourceMethodSecurityInterceptor -->
      <context-param>
         <param-name>resteasy.resource.method-interceptors</param-name>
         <param-value>
            org.jboss.resteasy.core.ResourceMethodSecurityInterceptor
         </param-value>
      </context-param>
   
      <listener>
         <listener-class>org.jboss.resteasy.plugins.server.servlet.ResteasyBootstrap</listener-class>
      </listener>
   
      <servlet>
         <servlet-name>Resteasy</servlet-name>
         <servlet-class>org.jboss.resteasy.plugins.server.servlet.HttpServletDispatcher</servlet-class>
      </servlet>
   
      <servlet-mapping>
         <servlet-name>Resteasy</servlet-name>
         <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
      </servlet-mapping>
     
   </web-app>
   

6. Start your tomcat in Eclipse and you should be good to go!