This document discusses Representational State Transfer (REST) and the Java API for RESTful Web Services (JAX-RS). It defines REST as an architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems that specifies resources be identified in requests using URIs and manipulated using representations and standard HTTP methods. It outlines how JAX-RS allows developing RESTful web services using Java by treating classes as resources identified with URIs and HTTP methods mapped to class methods using annotations. Major implementations of JAX-RS are also listed.