Jersey RESTful deployment on Tomcat 6 - web-services

Question

I am using the following setup to deploy a REST webservice on Tomcat 6 and it works:
<web-app>
<servlet>
<servlet-name>RestServlet</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>com.sun.jersey.spi.container.servlet.ServletContainer</servlet-class>
<load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>
<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>RestServlet</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
</web-app>
With the above setup, Tomcat scans WEB-INF/classes and WEB-INF/lib folders for the resources.
I then changed it to the following setup to use Application sub-class:
<web-app>
<servlet>
<servlet-name>RestServlet</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>com.sun.jersey.spi.container.servlet.ServletContainer</servlet-class>
<init-param>
<param-name>javax.ws.rs.Application</param-name>
<param-value>test.MyApplication</param-value>
</init-param>
<load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>
<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>RestServlet</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
</web-app>
where test.MyApplication is the sub-class of Application returning the resource class:
public class MyApplication extends Application {
public Set<Class<?>> getClasses() {
Set<Class<?>> s = new HashSet<Class<?>>();
s.add(MyResource.class);
return s;
}
}
But still the server scans WEB-INF/classes and WEB-INF/lib for the resources.
What am I missing? Does the server still scan WEB-INF when Application subclass is set in the web.xml?

Answer 1

Does the server still scan WEB-INF when Application subclass is set in the web.xml?
No it doesn't. The documentation explains that scanning the path is done if no resource configuration related initialization parameters (like javax.ws.rs.Application) are present.
You should see what's in your server logs. When Jersey initializes it logs what it's doing and for a classpath scan it prints something like:
INFO: Scanning for root resource and provider classes in the Web app resource paths:
/WEB-INF/lib
/WEB-INF/classes
When you provide an Application class it prints this instead:
INFO: Instantiated the Application class test.MyApplication
You should make sure that the proper web.xml file is deployed when the server starts. Maybe you still have the old version deployed.