New Apache project for RESTful web services

Apache Wink is a new framework for developing "RESTful web services". The project currently resides in the Apache Incubator, where newly introduced projects within the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) are matured and evaluated for promotion to full Apache projects, having entered the incubator in May. The code base for Wink was contributed by HP and IBM, who also intend to oversee the project in the future.

Version 0.1 of the framework is the first release to become available and consists of a server and a client module for serving and consuming RESTful web services. The modules are implementations of the JAX-RS 1.0 specification (Java API for RESTful Web Services; JSR 311) and plans to offer additional features for simplifying the development of web services based around the REST principle.

The REST (Representational State Transfer) approach has become increasingly popular for developing web applications particularly in the past few years. It involves mapping each object or resource in an application to a URL that can be accessed via HTTP methods like GET, POST, PUT and DELETE, which act as the mechanisms to respectively retrieve, create, update or delete the mapped resource.

(djwm)