After a few months RESTEasy 1.2.GA is finally ready. This is mostly a cleanup, bug fix, and refactoring release, but here are some features of note:

• Guice 2.0 support. Thanks Mike Brackx!
• Initial OAuth integration. Still a bit of a prototype, but we're moving forward with this very soon. Thanks Stef Epardaud!
• Link header support in client and server framework.
• Annotation triggered string parameter unmarshallers.
• Expanded examples to compliment my upcoming O'Reilly book on JAX-RS.
• Added Apache Client 4.0 support. It seems a bit quirky and slow compared to 3.1. I'd be curious to hear others experiences.

I'd also like to thank Attila Kiraly for fixing some bugs that cropped up in Multipart and XOP support. Pascal de Kloe, a new committer, also helped refactor content negotiation to support charset variants. Solomon Duskis continues to be a seasoned veteran and helps with bugs and features here and there. What's next? I'd like to focus next on getting complete OAuth support in. I think it will help out our REST-* efforts as we look to secure the services we're defining there. RESTEasy is also going to expand beyond a simple JAX-RS implementation. As JBoss projects like HornetQ, jBPM, Drools, Transactions, and Infinispan obtain RESTful interfaces, I'll be creating a REST profile under the RESTEasy umbrella. Useful links:

• Download 1.2.GA
• Release Notes: 1.2.GA and 1.2.RC1
• Documentation
• Migration guide

Congratulations on the JBoss RestEasy team for another great release. Using it and addicted to it ! :D

Forgot to thank Lincoln Baxter for adding client-side exception handling support!

Based on feedback of our users and our own benchmark results HttpClient 4.0 is known to be faster than 3.1 for small to medium messages, but not by much. HttpCore is _significantly_ faster than both if performance matters to you more than features. Could you please expand on being "a bit quirky"? Full disclaimer: I am one of Apache HttpClient developers Oleg

> Added Apache Client 4.0 support. It seems a bit quirky and slow compared to 3.1

Based on feedback of our users and our own benchmark results HttpClient 4.0 is known to be faster than 3.1 for small to medium messages, but not by much. HttpCore is _significantly_ faster than both if performance matters to you more than features.

Could you please expand on being "a bit quirky"?

Full disclaimer: I am one of Apache HttpClient developers

Oleg

I should both a) look into it a bit more and b) take this offline. I switched out 3.1 for 4.0 and RESTEasy testsuite ran 4-10 times slower (I forget the number but it was significant enough to rollback to 3.1). I really didn't have the cycles to look into it much, but it seemed that POSTs were really slow at times. Just a wild guess, but connection cleanup might be the issue because it seemed intermittent. I want to use 4.0 so I'll probably ping you sometime in the near future. Also, it would be cool to merge some RESTEasy client work with Apache Client. Have something JAX-RS friendly that doesn't have the overhead of wrapping a JAX-RS client api on top of Apache Client. I also have a bunch of ideas for asychronicity. Anyways...Thats a few months off for me. -- Bill

> I switched out 3.1 for 4.0 and RESTEasy testsuite ran 4-10 times slower (I forget the number but it was significant enough to rollback to 3.1).

The only plausible explanation for such a massive performance degradation could be improper configuration of the connection pool leading to worker threads spending most the time blocked waiting for a connection to become available. You are very welcome to let us know about ideas at dev at hc dot apache dot org Oleg

I updated our code base on Thursday to Resteasy 1.2 and httpclient 4.0 (somebody 'accidentally' added httpclient 4 dependency elsewhere and I decided to just go ahead and get rid of 3.1. It was relatively straightforward to do. I might have delayed if I'd known about the potential issues with httpclient 4.0. Anyway, so far so good and I can always roll back to 3.1 if we run into any issues. I haven't done any load tests with this so far. I did go for the threadsafe connection manager btw with some reasonable settings suggested in the httpclient tutorial. Using the default connection manager would not be appropriate on an application server probably and might explain the slowdown.