I am developing a RESTful Web Service and while reading the Jersey documentation I came across an annotation @Singleton
In my web service I am mostly returning data based on the unique keys provided as parameter.
An analogy would be return all the information of a Student when the Student_Id is passed.
So my question is when @Singleton
would be suited in such kind of Web Services?
As per documentation for @RequestScoped
If the resource is used more than one time in the request processing, always the same instance will be used.
Then in that case we should not bother to use @Singleton
right?
Also what could be the use cases where we have to make a new instance for every request?
I did have a look at this post but my question was not answered.
By default Jersey creates a new instance of the resource class for every request. So if you don't annotate the Jersey resource class, it implicitly uses @RequestScoped
scope. It is stated in Jersey documentation:
Default lifecycle (applied when no annotation is present). In this
scope the resource instance is created for each new request and used
for processing of this request. If the resource is used more than one
time in the request processing, always the same instance will be used.
This can happen when a resource is a sub resource is returned more
times during the matching. In this situation only on instance will
server the requests.
Most cases you use this default setting so you don't use @Singleton
scope. You can also create a singleton Jersey resource class by using @Singleton
annotation. Then you need to register the singleton class in the MyApplication
class, e.g.,
@Path("/resource")
@Singleton
public class JerseySingletonClass {
//methods ...
}
public class MyApplication extends ResourceConfig {
/*Register JAX-RS application components.*/
public MyApplication () {
register(JerseySingletonClass.class);
}
}
In most cases default scope @RequestScoped
should be sufficient for your needs.
@Singleton
may hold state. I had the problem when my endpoint was annotated as @Singleton
so it reused the same EntityManager
during concurrent calls. After removing @Singleton
, during concurrent calls, different EntityManager
object instances are used. If endpoint calls are subsequent, it may be that previous/old EntityManager
will be used. - Jersey, Guice and Hibernate - EntityManager thread safety
There is actually a use case specified in the Jersey 2 manual for using the SseBroadcaster when serving Server-Sent events, it is covered in this provided example
The BroadcasterResource resource class is annotated with @Singleton annotation which tells Jersey runtime that only a single instance of the resource class should be used to serve all the incoming requests to /broadcast path. This is needed as we want to keep an application-wide single reference to the private broadcaster field so that we can use the same instance for all requests. Clients that want to listen to SSE events first send a GET request to the BroadcasterResource, that is handled by the listenToBroadcast() resource method.
Using the @Singleton
, The application will only contain one SseBroadcaster
for all incoming requests, one such broadcaster is enough to serve multiple clients, so it only needs to be instantiated once!
JAX-RS SSE API defines SseBroadcaster which allows to broadcast individual events to multiple clients.