[devs1010]

look at spring roo, its a more modern approach and uses active record rather than the service layers / repositories, it makes generating json api's really simple

[hello_moto]

A few points:

1) Spring Roo is not necessarily a more modern approach. It's more similar to Rails.

2) JAX-RS is more like Sinatra than Rails. Generating JSON api is already simple in JAX-RS.

3) Not everybody wants ActiveRecord

http://www.braintreepayments.com/devblog/untangle-domain-and...

https://github.com/braintree/curator#readme

4) JAX-RS comes with standard Java EE (moot point)

5) You can re-use your Servlet knowledge with JAX-RS to some extend (Filter, setting up web.xml, etc)

Not to take anything away from Spring Roo which is a wonderful project.