I wonder if Jersey should ship with a default implementation of WadlResource and WadlResourceResource (or whatever the 2 classes are called - one for the application and one for sub resources) but by default they are not mapped to anything (or maybe they are just mapped to /application.wadl but then derived classes can map them to new URIs with new @Produces/@ImplicitProduces?.

Then users can just derive from them and map them to a URI if they wish?

e.g.

@Path("api") @ImplicitProduces("text/html;qs=5") @Produces({"application/vnd.sun.wadl+xml", "application/xml", "application/json"}) public class MyWadlResource extends WadlResource { ... // not much code or inner knowledge of Jersey's impl required here apart from the factory method to create nested resources...

protected WadlResourceResource createChildResource(String uri) { return new MyWadlResourceResource(...); } }

Then the derived class is mostly about adding your own @Path / @Produces and optional @ImplicitProduces and helper methods if you need any? I'm keen for there to be as little ninja-Jersey hacking required for folks to add the API stuff to their apps