[edwinnathaniel]

You can use Servlet + Jersey. It's just one dependency away and minimal web.xml config (or spring-jersey...whichever). It's not necessarily tied to Java EE albeit Java EE app-server _must_ implement JAX-RS properly.

[pron]

Both Servlet and JAX-RS are pretty central pieces of Java EE. But Java EE is now really a collection of modules that you can pick and choose.