title: Any easy REST tutorials for Java?
body: <p>Every tutorial or explanation of REST just goes too complicated too quickly - the learning curve rises so fast after the initial explanation of CRUD and the supposed simplicity over SOAP.  Why can't people write decent tutorials anymore!</p>
  
  <p>I'm looking at Restlet - and its not the best, there are things missing in the tutorial and the language/grammar is a bit confusing and unclear.  It has took me hours to untangle their First Steps tutorial (with the help of another Java programmer!)</p>
  
  <p><strong>RESTlet Tutorial Comments</strong></p>
  
  <p>Overall I'm not sure exactly who the tutorial was aimed at - because there is a fair degree of assumed knowledge all round, so coming into REST and Restlet framework cold leaves you with a lot of 'catchup work' to do, and re-reading paragraphs over and over again.</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>We had difficulty working out that the jars had to be in copied into the correct lib folder. </p></li>
  <li><p>Problems with web.xml creating a HTTP Status 500 error - </p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>The server encountered an internal
    error () that prevented it from
    fulfilling this request</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>, the tutorial says: </p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>"Create a new Servlet Web application
    as usual, add a
    "com.firstStepsServlet" package and
    put the resource and application
    classes in."</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>This means that your fully qualified name for your class <strong>FirstStepsApplication</strong> is <strong>com.firstStepsServlet.FirstStepsApplication</strong>, so we had to alter web.xml to refer to the correct class e.g:</p>
  
  <p>original:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;param-value&gt;
           firstStepsServlet.FirstStepsApplication
  &lt;/param-value&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>should be:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;param-value&gt;
           com.firstStepsServlet.FirstStepsApplication
  &lt;/param-value&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
  
  <p>I was under the impression that the concepts of REST were supposed to be much simpler than SOAP - but it seems just as bad if not more complicated - don't get it at all! grrrr</p>
  
  <p>Any good links - much appreciated.</p>