text: I have a few utility methods that I wrote in Java, for test data creation against a service. A couple of my colleagues who have the same use case thought it would be cool if they could re-use it, but they are writing their tests in Perl and Python respectively. So I am thinking of standing up a JSON REST service that would expose these methods.
  I have limited experience writing web-apps. What would be the fastest way to stand up and deploy my service?
  I am thinking of using eclipse/spring to do it and ant to deploy on a Jetty container. But I would like to hear your experiences about this. Also it seems some IDEs/Plugins have better support for some technologies than others. So I would like to hear what IDE/Plugins + J2EE Technology stack + Server(If that matters) is a good combination for my usecase and why. I would like to stick to open source software.
  I believe using Maven gets you up as fast as one can. Here's how you can do it.
  It uses the RESTEasy implementation of JAX-RS (the Java API for RESTful Web Services, an official part of Java EE 6).
  This is a java war maven project with the bare minimum structure. These are the files:
  -pom.xml -src | --main | --java | --rest | --HelloResource.java --JaxRsActivator.java
  I called it
  simpleRest as seen below. All the archives are exactly as shown:
  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <project xmlns="" xmlns: <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion> <groupId>simpleRest</groupId> <artifactId>simpleRest</artifactId> <version>1.0</version> <packaging>war</packaging> <dependencies> <dependency> <groupId>org.jboss.resteasy</groupId> <artifactId>resteasy-jaxrs</artifactId> <version>2.3.1.GA</version> <scope>provided</scope> </dependency> </dependencies> <build> <finalName>${project.artifactId}</finalName> <plugins> <plugin> <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId> <version>2.1.1</version> <configuration> <!-- So maven doesn't require web.xml --> <failOnMissingWebXml>false</failOnMissingWebXml> </configuration> </plugin> </plugins> </build> </project>
  package rest; import java.util.Date; import javax.ws.rs.GET; import javax.ws.rs.Path; import javax.ws.rs.Produces; @Path("/hello") public class HelloResource { @GET @Produces("text/plain") public String helloResource() { return "Hello! It's "+new Date(); } }
  package rest; import javax.ws.rs.ApplicationPath; import javax.ws.rs.core.Application; @ApplicationPath("/rest") public class JaxRsActivator extends Application { }
  This generates a
  simpleRest.war (through
  mvn clean package). You can deploy it to a freshly installed JBoss AS 7.1.1.Final (just throw the war file in the deploy folder) or a Tomcat.
  After that, the URL is available as expected:
  How quick is that?