The approach we take is ideal for software developers with some, or extensive, programming experience: we design a RESTful API, which serves as our software specification, and implement it with every framework discussed in the book—there are no hypothetical examples; only practical working applications. This book is for Java developers who want to code RESTful web services using any of the open source RESTful frameworks available to date, for example, JAX-RS implementations such as Jersey and RESTEasy, the Restlet lightweight framework, or Struts 2 with the REST plug-in. You dont need to know REST, as we cover the theory of REST and web services; however, you should be familiar with the Java language and have some understanding of Java web applications. For each framework, we develop the same web service outlined in Chapter 4, so there is lots of working code available. This is a practical guide and the majority of the book is about coding RESTful web services, and not just about the theory of REST.