Spring Web Services together with JAXB 2.0 provides a convenient way to implement POX Web Services in Java. POX means Plain Old XML, and a POX Web Service is a protocol based on sending XML over HTTP without using any well-known protocol framework like SOAP or XML-RPC. First you have to define annotated JAXB classes for all XML request and response messages. If you have a schema, you can generate them with the xjc tool.

You can implement RESTful Web Services in Java using the JAX-RS framework. JAX-RS is part of the JavaEE 6 platform. But if you are not using a JavaEE 6 application server, you can use the reference implementation Jersey and embed it in any web application server. However, it’s quite awkward to produce JSON output from Jersey. Jersey has some support for producing JSON via JAXB, but to get the NATURAL encoding (which you probably want) you need JAXB 2.