Elliotte Rusty Harolde wants everyone to submit comments on the proposed Java API for RESTful Web Services asking them to drop the whole idea:

…there are some companies (Sun being one of them) that can’t imagine regular, ordinary developers building systems without using some ultra-complex framework they’ve designed. The idea that people might just want to send plain old XML over plain old HTTP is inconceivable to them. There has to be some big framework for serializing objects and abstracting databases and faking method calls and guaranteeing message delivery and a dozen other things people either can already do perfectly well with HTTP and XML or don’t actually need to do at all.

…The problem is not HTTP or requiring developers to understand it. The problem is that Sun’s server-side HTTP API blows chunks…

I agree that this sounds misguided. If you provide SOAP-style wrappers around REST to hide the fact that you are dealing with HTTP, then is just isn’t REST anymore, and you will probably end up with all of the problems of SOAP and WS-*.