I am fairly new to many of the concepts and technologies being used in this question so I would appreciate a little understanding and help for a beginner from the community. I am using the Play Framework version 2.1.3 and I need to POST data to a RESTful web service so that it can be inserted into a remote database. An XML response will be returned indicating either success or failure.
I am sure you are aware that the documentation for the Play Framework is quite lacking and is in no way helpful to beginners, therefore I am unsure of how to accomplish this task with best practices in mind. I am looking for a Java solution to this problem, I do not have the time at present to learn the Scala language. My experience with Web Services is fairly limited, normally I would implement a DAO design pattern (or use one of the many available ORM libraries depending on needs) within my application and use JDBC to connect directly to the database. That is not an option here.
My first question would have to be, is there a recommended design pattern for accessing web services? Then, considering the Play MVC framework, how would one best implement such a design pattern, package the data (assuming the application has already captured and validated data from the user), send it off and process the responses back to the user?
I know it is a fairly lengthy question however my intention behind this is to create a knowledge base of sorts for beginners who can easily come in with limited experience, read, understand and replicate what they find here to produce a working solution. Having searched the web quite extensively, I have found a few disjointed snippets but nothing concrete involving these technologies and no up-to-date tutorials. Thank you for your time.