Thank You for your comments. I certainly believe as you do, and as I’m certain you’ve seen, been taken to task for it as well in the Java community (oddly, by Gavin himself). However, it is people like you and Gavin that have pushed JEE innovation, and I can’t wait to play around with Restlet 1.0 Beta 1.

I agree that architects should have a broader view of their systems than the one proposed by JEE. As a matter of fact, any standard effort takes time: 1) to build a consensus of what is the best technology/pattern and 2) to agree on the way to support it via a set of APIs. I think JCP shouldn’t try to be leading innovation on all fronts of the JEE landscape, and also stay open to its community. The adoption of Spring and Hibernate ideas in EJB 3.0 is a good thing. There is definitely a need for standards when you consider the huge investments in tools, trainings, etc. People can’t learn all the alternatives, or even compare all of them, so the JCP should try to take the best of existing practices, alternative frameworks and digest them into the best objective compromise.

Restlet is a REST framework for Java and a complete alternative to Servlet. The goal is essentially to bring REST ideas closer to the JEE world which is still too focused on remote procedures thinking (SOAP and WS-* stack). There is a serious need for a shake up in this area. JEE isn’t the center of everything, this center is the Web, so I would prefer to see JEE leading in the Web 2.0 world rather than trying to play catch up in two years.

Restlet version 1.0 beta 1 was released today.
You can check it out at http://www.restlet.org