Migrating to Quarkus REST (formerly RESTEasy Reactive)

Migrating from RESTEasy Classic to Quarkus REST (formerly RESTEasy Reactive) is straightforward in most cases, however there are a few cases that require some attention. This document provides a list of issues users attempting the migration should be aware of.

The reference documentation of Quarkus REST can be found here.

Server

The server part of Quarkus REST (quarkus-rest and its dependencies) provide an implementation of the Jakarta REST specification, but leverage Quarkus' build time processing and the unified I/O model provided by Vert.x.

Dependencies

The following table matches the legacy RESTEasy dependencies with the new Quarkus REST ones.

Legacy Quarkus REST

quarkus-resteasy

quarkus-rest

quarkus-resteasy-jackson

quarkus-rest-jackson

quarkus-resteasy-jsonb

quarkus-rest-jsonb

quarkus-resteasy-jaxb

quarkus-rest-jaxb

quarkus-resteasy-qute

quarkus-rest-qute

The quarkus-resteasy-mutiny does not have a corresponding dependency, as Quarkus REST provides Mutiny integration out of the box.

Annotations

Quarkus REST does not support the various custom annotation under the org.jboss.resteasy.annotations package.

The following table matches the legacy RESTEasy annotations with the new Quarkus REST ones.

Legacy Quarkus REST Comments

org.jboss.resteasy.annotations.jaxrs.PathParam

org.jboss.resteasy.reactive.RestPath

This annotation is not necessary when the path part matches the method parameter name

org.jboss.resteasy.annotations.jaxrs.QueryParam

org.jboss.resteasy.reactive.RestQuery

org.jboss.resteasy.annotations.jaxrs.FormParam

org.jboss.resteasy.reactive.RestForm

org.jboss.resteasy.annotations.jaxrs.HeaderParam

org.jboss.resteasy.reactive.RestHeader

org.jboss.resteasy.annotations.jaxrs.CookieParam

org.jboss.resteasy.reactive.RestCookie

org.jboss.resteasy.annotations.jaxrs.MatrixParam

org.jboss.resteasy.reactive.RestMatrix

org.jboss.resteasy.annotations.cache.Cache

org.jboss.resteasy.reactive.Cache

org.jboss.resteasy.annotations.cache.NoCache

org.jboss.resteasy.reactive.NoCache

org.jboss.resteasy.annotations.SseElementType

org.jboss.resteasy.reactive.RestStreamElementType

org.jboss.resteasy.annotations.Separator

org.jboss.resteasy.reactive.Separator

The previous table does not include the org.jboss.resteasy.annotations.Form annotation because there is no Quarkus REST specific replacement for it. Users are instead encouraged to use the Jakarta REST standard jakarta.ws.rs.BeanParam annotation which is supported on both the server and the client.

Jakarta REST providers

Although Quarkus REST provides the same spec compliant behavior as RESTEasy Classic does, it does not include the same exact provider implementations at runtime.

The most common case where the difference in providers might result in different behavior, is the included jakarta.ws.rs.ext.ExceptionMapper implementations. To see what classes are included in the application, launch the application in dev mode and navigate to http://localhost:8080/q/dev-ui/io.quarkus.quarkus-rest/exception-mappers.

Service Loading

RESTEasy Classic supports determining providers at build time using Java’s Service Loader. In order to ensure that all providers are determined at build time, Quarkus REST does not support this feature. Instead, users that have providers in application dependencies are encouraged to index those dependencies using one of the methods described in the Bean Discovery section of the CDI guide.

Multipart support

HTTP Multipart support in Quarkus REST does not reuse the same types or annotations as RESTEasy Classic and thus users are encouraged to read this part of the reference documentation.

Users migrating multipart resources to Quarkus REST should be aware of the configuration parameter quarkus.http.limits.max-form-attribute-size, as this poses an upper limit to the size of each part. Any request with a part size exceeding this configuration value will result in HTTP status code 413.

Default media types

Quarkus uses smart defaults when determining the media type of Jakarta REST methods in order to simplify common use cases. The difference between quarkus-rest and quarkus-resteasy is the use of text/plain as the default media type instead of text/html when the method returns a String.

Injection of @SessionScoped beans

@SessionScoped beans are currently not supported. Should you really need this functionality, you’ll need to use RESTEasy Classic instead of RESTEasy Reactive.

Servlets

Quarkus REST does not support servlets. If your project depends on servlets you have to migrate them. A servlet-based JAX-RS implementation must support injections of these types with the @Context annotation: ServletConfig, ServletContext, HttpServletRequest and HttpServletResponse. Since Quarkus REST is not servlet-based these injections will not work.

It is not always obvious that this will fail especially if you depend on an extension like quarkus-undertow which supplies the interfaces. For example, if you write this you could compile it but get an exception on calling it:

@Path("/reactive")
public class ReactiveResource {

    @Context
    HttpServletRequest httpServletRequest;

    @GET
    @Produces(MediaType.TEXT_PLAIN)
    public String servletContextPath() {

        String contextPath = httpServletRequest.getContextPath();

        return "My context path is: " + contextPath;
    }
}

The same is true for your third-party libraries. If they happen to depend on servlets you need to find a migration path for them.

Log authentication and authorization failures

The Quarkus REST endpoint security checks are performed before CDI interceptors are invoked. The safest approach to log Quarkus Security authentication exceptions is to ensure that proactive authentication is enabled and to use Vert.x HTTP route failure handlers. For more information, see the Customize authentication exception responses section of the Proactive authentication guide.

Client

The REST Client (quarkus-rest-client and its dependencies) replaces the legacy RESTEasy Classic-based quarkus-resteasy-client and leverages Quarkus' build time processing and the unified I/O model provided by Vert.x.

Dependencies

The following table matches the legacy RESTEasy Classic-based REST Client dependencies with the new REST Client ones.

Legacy Quarkus REST

quarkus-resteasy-client

quarkus-rest-client

quarkus-resteasy-client-jackson

quarkus-rest-client-jackson

quarkus-resteasy-client-jsonb

quarkus-rest-client-jsonb

quarkus-resteasy-client-jaxb

quarkus-rest-client-jaxb

quarkus-resteasy-client-mutiny

No replacement, natively supports Mutiny

Keycloak admin client

When using quarkus-rest-client, users can use the quarkus-keycloak-admin-rest-client to administer the target Keycloak instance by leveraging the rest client.

When using quarkus-resteasy-client however, users must use quarkus-keycloak-admin-resteasy-client to access the same functionality and use the legacy RESTEasy Classic-based REST Client.

OIDC

When using quarkus-rest-client, users can use the quarkus-rest-client-oidc-filter extension to acquire and refresh access tokens from OpenID Connect and OAuth 2.0 compliant Authorization Servers.

When using quarkus-resteasy-client however, users must use quarkus-resteasy-client-oidc-filter to access the same functionality.

Similarly, quarkus-rest-client-oidc-token-propagation allows user of the legacy REST to propagate the current Bearer or Authorization Code Flow access tokens.

When using quarkus-resteasy-client however, users must use quarkus-resteasy-client-oidc-token-propagation to access the same functionality.

Custom extensions

This is an advanced section that only needs to be read by users who have developed custom extensions that depend on Jakarta REST and / or REST Client functionality.

Dependencies

A first concern is whether custom extensions should depend on Quarkus REST explicitly, or alternatively support both RESTEasy flavors and leave it to the user to decide. If the extension is some general purpose extension, it probably makes sense to choose the latter option, while the former option is easiest to adopt when the custom extension is used by a specific set of users / applications.

When opting for supporting both extensions, the deployment module of the custom extension will usually depend on the SPI modules - quarkus-jaxrs-spi-deployment, quarkus-resteasy-common-spi, quarkus-rest-spi-deployment, while the runtime modules will have optional dependencies on the runtime modules of both RESTEasy flavors.

A couple good examples of how Quarkus uses this strategy to support both RESTEasy flavors in the core repository can be seen [here](https://github.com/quarkusio/quarkus/pull/21089) and [here](https://github.com/quarkusio/quarkus/pull/20874).

In general, it should not be needed to have two different versions of the custom extension to support both flavors. Such a choice is only strictly necessary if it is desired for the extension consumers (i.e. Quarkus applications) to not have to select a RESTEasy version themselves.

Resource and Provider discovery

Custom extensions that contain Jakarta REST Resources, Providers or REST Client interfaces in their runtime modules and depend on Jandex indexing for their discovery (for example because they have an empty META-INF/beans.xml file) don’t have to perform any additional setup to make these discoverable by Quarkus REST.

Provider registration via Build Items

Extensions that register providers via build items use the io.quarkus.resteasy.common.spi.ResteasyJaxrsProviderBuildItem build item in RESTEasy Classic. With Quarkus REST however, extensions need to use specific build items, such as io.quarkus.resteasy.reactive.spi.MessageBodyWriterBuildItem and io.quarkus.resteasy.reactive.spi.MessageBodyWriterBuildItem.

REST Client

Any code that is run as part of a Quarkus application that used the RESTEasy Client, can safely use the REST Client, as all necessary setup for it has been done at the application’s static-init phase.

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