Singleton Injection in JAX-RS

JAX-RS defines a Java API for implementing RESTful server-side functions in Java. Being a post-Spring framework, it uses annotations extensively to denotate "resource" injection points. One of these DI annotations is called Provider. A provider is an application supplied class used to extend a JAX-RS run-time such as Jersey. A JAX-RS implementation is required to load only one instance of a provider class in a JAX-RS run-time instance. An application developer can leverage this feature to inject singletons, e.g. a database manager class, into JAX-RS resources. Here is an example on how to do this.

First, define the singleton class.

public class MyDBManager{
   public void store(final String key, final String value) {
      // Store the key-value pair in a DB.
   }
}

As you can see, this class is just a POJO. No special singleton marking anywhere in the class definition.

Next, we will use ContextResolver and @Provider annotatoin to turn MyDBManager into a JAX-RS provider.

import javax.ws.rs.ext.ContextResolver;
import javax.ws.rs.ext.Provider;

@Provider
public class DBResolver implements ContextResolver<MyDBManager> {
   private MyDBManager db;
   
   // A provider must have at least a zero-arg constructor.
   public DBResolver() {
      db = new MyDBManager();
   }
   public MyDBManager getContext(Class type) {
      return db;
   }
}

Now we can inject MyDBManager into a resource class through @Context like this:

import javax.ws.rs.Consumes;
import javax.ws.rs.POST;
import javax.ws.rs.Path;
import javax.ws.rs.PathParam;
import javax.ws.rs.Produces;
import javax.ws.rs.core.Context;
import javax.ws.rs.ext.ContextResolver;

@Path("/myresrc")
public class MyResource {
   @POST
   @Path("/{id}")
   @Consumes("text/plain")
   @Produces("text/plain")
   public String post(final @Context ContextResolver myDbManager,
                      final @PathParam("id") String id) {
      myDbManager.getContext(MyResource.class).store(id, "someValue");
      return "OK";
   }
}

Two observations from this method of injecting a singleton:

• The singleton instance of DBManager is not instantiated until MyResource is invoked the first time.
• The type T in ContextResolver<T> can be an interface so an implementation of the ContextResolver<T> can return an implementation of the T. But, the implementation of T can only be determined by a Class object.

Therefore, this @Provider-based injection method should not be taken as a general purpose DI mechanism because JAX-RS is not a general purpose DI framework. It is not only ugly but also comes with a reflection overhead when the resource is invoked. Using Guice or Spring instead for general purpose DI.