{8.1.0-updated} Class Hierarchy

The class hierarchy for the REST servlet class is shown below:

For top-level resources, you'll typically extend from one of the classes above.

For child resources, you can either extend from one of the classes above, or extend from one of the following that provides identical support but does not extent from HttpServlet:

One reason to use the latter classes as your base classes is when you're implementing REST resources as @Bean-annotated Spring Beans and you don't want them to be automatically registered as top-level servlets.

The servlets with RDF support require Jena on the classpath. All other serializers and parsers do not have any external library dependencies. For this reason, we have separate servlets for supporting RDF so that you don't need Jena if you don't need to support RDF.

Everything is configured through the following classes which you will see a lot: