As the RESTful architectural style has been gaining ground in Web application development, the JSR 311, JAX-RS, Java API for RESTful Web Services expert group published the early draft version of its specification. The draft version is a result of over six months of work from the 22-member expert group, and includes a reference implementation of the current spec version. A NetBeans plugin is also available for the JSR 311 API that can expose an entity bean as a REST resource:
RESTful Web Services is a relatively new area in the industry and there are still a lot of unknowns in this space. For example, a key aspect of RESTful Web Services is for the service to be stateless. However, this often requires the developer to produce boiler-plate state restoration code that could be avoided with state-aware API help. We expect the expert group to be an active and engaged group of people participating to prioritize and help drive issues to achieve the end goal of a developer friendly API...
This API will enable developers to rapidly build Web applications in Java that are characteristic of the best designed parts of the Web. This JSR will develop an API for providing REST... support in the Java Platform. Lightweight, RESTful approaches are emerging as a popular alternative to SOAP-based technologies for deployment of services on the internet. Currently, building RESTful Web services using the Java Platform is significantly more complex than building SOAP-based services and requires using low-level APIs like Servlets or the dynamic JAX-WS APIs. Correct implementation requires a high level of HTTP knowledge on the developer's part.
This JSR will aim to provide a high level easy-to use API for developers to write RESTful web services independent of the underlying technology and will allow these services to run on top of the Java EE or the Java SE platforms. The expert group will investigate whether a subset of the API can be made used with Java ME. The goal of this JSR is to provide an easy to use, declarative style of programming using annotations for developers to write REST ful Web Services and also enable low level access in cases where needed by the application.
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