Are asynchronous RESTful web services possible?

Question

Reading RESTful documentation, it does not seem like it is possible to implement an asynchronous instance, but someone may know better on SO.

What I mean here is I would like to execute service requests asynchronously:

@Path("/helloworld", asyncSupported=true)
public class MyHelloWorldService {
    ...
}

I know asyncSupported is not defined in @Path, but I am looking for something similar to @WebServlet. Then, I would like to use AsyncContext instances (or anything equivalent).

Is this possible?

Answer 1

RestEasy has some support¹ for it - using a custom annotation called @Suspend.

See here: http://docs.jboss.org/resteasy/docs/2.2.1.GA/userguide/html/Asynchronous_HTTP_Request_Processing.html

There is also a framework/library on top of Jersey called Atmosphere however that might be overkill for your usecase as its focus appears to be on long-polling client/server web applications ( e.g. chats - https://github.com/Atmosphere/atmosphere )

[1] The CDI scope for your request will be lost in in the thread that actually executes the logic. See the RESTEasy-682 issue for more information. This is a problem that hasn't been solved by any REST frameworks that I know of at this moment^{[March 2014]}.