Cloud Computing is gaining increasing attention within enterprises of all shapes and sizes, but few technologists actually have hands-on experience building Cloud solutions. Taking standard software applications, databases, and user interfaces and deploying them in a Cloud environment is a recipe for disaster. The Cloud is a different animal, requiring different skills and expertise to be successful.

Although many of the services in active use are SOAP or at least XML-based, an increasing number of services take a RESTful approach to data transmission. Representational state transfer (REST) is a style of software architecture that differs from the more traditional Remote Procedure Call (RPC) style of data transmission, instead emphasizing the importance of defining and retrieving representations of resources.
The Java JAX-RS specification covers how to implement RESTful services with Java. This specification is driven by annotations and can be leveraged from many different environments, including a Java EE 'Application Server'. With the recent inclusion of the JAX-RS specification in the Java EE 6 umbrella of technologies implementing RESTful services with JAX-RS will become even easier.