Have a web service that implements REST (sort of) ,
- Client request is made for some entity
- Server populates a model (that was created with JAXB)
- Converted to Xml and sent back
- Client reads Xml into same JAXB Model
This works fine, but i dont use any REST libraries.
Am I missing out, I cant see what complexity they could hide because the code to send /receive a request and convert to/from JAXB is already pretty simple.
For your basic use case, you will probably not benefit a lot from using JAX-RS(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_API_for_RESTful_Web_Services), which is the Java standard for REST.
However, as you can see if you follow the link, there are some useful annotations, which might make your life easier later on. For example, if you would start returning plain text next to xml as well, based on request header, that becomes incredibly easy to configure(with @Produces).
Same for when you want to support multiple types of request payloads(@Consumes).
Check http://docs.oracle.com/javaee/6/tutorial/doc/gkknj.html for a good tutorial.
In short, JAX-RS offers a lot of useful functionality with regard to request headers, parameters,etc.. that would otherwise be harder to implement.
However, many applications do not need this “full fine-grained REST” support, so sticking with just JAXB might be enough for your needs.