JBoss fellow Bill Burke has been championing the effort and crowed about the technology achieving a version 1.0 generally available release on Jan. 21. "I am pleased to announce the first GA release of JBoss RESTEasy," Burke said in a blog post on the technology.

RESTEasy is a fully certified and portable implementation of the JAX-RS specification. JAX-RS is also known as Java Specification Request (JSR) 311 -- the Java API for RESTful Web Services. JAX-RS is a new Java Community Process (JCP) specification that provides a Java API for RESTful Web Services over the HTTP protocol.

"REST is a set of architectural principles that defines why the World Wide Web has been so successful at scaling so massively and how you can apply those principles to modern distributed applications," Burke told eWEEK. "While not protocol-specific, when people talk about REST they usually are talking about using HTTP in a RESTful manner. I like to think of REST as the rebirth or rediscovery of HTTP. Distributed technologies like WS-*/SOAP [the web services stack and Simple Object Access Protocol] have used HTTP solely as a transport protocol when in reality it is a very rich protocol -- caching and content-negotiation are two examples."

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