Jersey does not supply "commonly used" native image reflection metadata

[ljnelson]

A Jersey-based (Helidon MP) application running in native image may need to deal with @PathParam objects of type String, Integer, etc. (or a user-created type). To work with them successfully, Jersey will in many codepaths call their single-String-argument constructors reflectively. Jersey does not supply the relevant reflect-config.json metadata for such invocations. End users may see stack traces similar to the following:

org.graalvm.nativeimage.MissingReflectionRegistrationError: The program tried to reflectively invoke method public java.lang.String(java.lang.String) without it being registered for runtime reflection. Add public java.lang.String(java.lang.String) to the reflection metadata to solve this problem. See https://www.graalvm.org/latest/reference-manual/native-image/metadata/#reflection for help.

The Helidon team's opinion is that—rather than the end user having to follow this advice—Jersey should supply metadata for "commonly used" types, for some value of "commonly used", which might be as simple as "types in java.lang that feature single-String-argument constructors", so that the most basic of JAX-RS applications will work, hopefully, out of the box. This may end up being true as well for static valueOf(String) methods and the like.

In the meantime, Helidon should add this, and/or similar, information to our jersey/server reflect-config.json file.

[ljnelson]

See #9441, which introduces this resource as described.