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I've been given the task to embed binary data (like pictures, music, thumbnails etc) into a xml metadata container in order to publish the whole package via REST interface. Currently we're using Jersey and spring in our project. I really don't want to fall back to soap/wsdl (which seems to be the default answer for every ws-based problem) or any container format like zip just to get that data over the wire so i googled a while for a more appropriate solution.

I found out that recommends the XOP format for embedding content into xml which is part of the MTOM protocol used in SOAP but I don't see a solution that provides XML+XOP responses via REST directly.

My question: can someone give me a hint how to implement XOP + REST by using Jersey / spring? I've seen posts that imply that someone has done it before...

Best regards,
tim

Tim
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2 Answers2

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Why would you want to embed binary data into XML? There are plenty of ways to associate binary resources to their corresponding metadata without trying to stuff it into a single representation.

You are defeating one of the primary benefits of REST HTTP. The ability to handle multiple different media-types based on the requirements is one of the reasons using REST over HTTP can be more effective than SOAP.

Consider retrieving an XML representation of the metadata that contains a link to the binary resource as Atom does. If you want to retrieve the binary first, then consider Link Headers to point to the metadata. There are lots of better ways than trying to stuff binary data into XML.

Darrel Miller
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  • thanks for the answer. Sadly, splitting content is no option. One of the causes is that there's a security model behind that bundles content according to acls. Another cause would be that a bundle has to be transmitted completely - imagine a fatal situation if there's some part of the message missing because the client didn't initiate a request immediately. The last and most important is that right now i'm not in the position to do project-wide decisions :) – Tim Dec 14 '10 at 15:29
  • @Tim According to the XOP spec `http://www.w3.org/TR/xop10/` you would just use `Multipart/Related` as the media type. Encoding and decoding of this media type is completely orthogonal to REST, so the trick would be to find a Java library that can process `Multipart/Related` content. At that point, I'm not even sure you need XOP anymore. – Darrel Miller Dec 15 '10 at 12:33
  • thanks darrel. at some point this is quite what i had found out before. If i happen to have enough time, i'll try and evaluate this solution and if it proves successful i'll drop some more lines here. – Tim Dec 16 '10 at 11:56
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I'm not sure about Jersey, but CXF has support for XOP. Perhaps you can take inspiration from there?

http://cxf.apache.org/docs/jax-rs-multiparts.html#JAX-RSMultiparts-XOPsupport

BenCourliss
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