title: Why use JAX-RS / Jersey?
body: <p>Sorry, this questions sounds silly, but after developing some of my RESTful services using Jersey, I asked myself the question -- If REST is just an architecture, and not a protocol like SOAP, why do we need a specification like JAX-RS?</p>
  
  <p>I actually googled for questions like "What is the difference between servlets and RESTful services over HTTP" and to sum up the community answers, I got:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>RESTful service development (on Jersey) is an architecture, which inherently uses servlets.</li>
  <li>JAX-RS compliant tools like Jersey provide easy marshalling-unmarshalling of XML/JSON data, helping the developers.</li>
  <li>REST helps us use GET/POST/PUT/DELETE in a fashion that is far efficient than normal servlets.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>According to these answers, I guess if I write a servlet which uses JAXB (for dealing with automatic serialization), and I efficiently use GET/POST/PUT/DELETE in my servlet code, I don't use a tool like Jersey, and hence JAX-RS.</p>
  
  <p>I know I am terribly wrong passing this statement, please correct me.</p>
  
  <p>PS: This doubt actually came in when I had to develop some RESTful services in PHP. After going on through some of the RESTful PHP codes, I realized they are just the same old PHP scripts, with some helper methods for handling XML/JSON.</p>