Spring MVC RESTful web services with Jackson: How to restrict to subset of URLs - json

Question

Following the steps outlined here http://www.journaldev.com/2552/spring-restful-web-service-example-with-json-jackson-and-client-program , I've been able to setup my RESTful WS exactly how I want it.
Now, I want to make this app context a hybrid of RESTful WS (under a specific URL prefix /myapp/rest/) and standard MVC mappings for the rest of the site.
But from the servlet-context XML file, I can't really make out how to restrict MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverterto only apply to a certain URL prefix.
<!-- Configure to plugin JSON as request and response in method handler -->
<beans:bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.method.annotation.RequestMappingHandlerAdapter">
<beans:property name="messageConverters">
<beans:list>
<beans:ref bean="jsonMessageConverter"/>
</beans:list>
</beans:property>
</beans:bean>
<!-- Configure bean to convert JSON to POJO and vice versa -->
<beans:bean id="jsonMessageConverter" class="org.springframework.http.converter.json.MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter">
</beans:bean>
Is there anything else that I should be checking on here?
Thanks
Wong

Answer 1

You can have both SpringMVC style controllers and SpringMVC REST style controllers in the same application. In fact you can write one SpringMVC handler method and a REST Endpoint in same controller too.
#Controller
public class MyController
{
#RequestMapping("/home")
public String homePage(Model model)
{
model.addAttribute("data",someObject);
return "home"; //this will render the view home.jsp
}
#RequestMapping(value="/users", method=RequestMethod.POST)
#ResponseBody
public User saveUser(#RequestBody User user)
{
//persist user
return user; //this will return JSON/XML based representation of User object
}
}
Observe the use of #RequestBody and #ResponseBody annotations for REST style handler methods.