Java EE developers are increasingly required to embrace thin-server-architecture client application development while leveraging their existing components. On the surface, this appears to simply mean using JAX-RS to expose RESTful services. But the real challenges are often misunderstood and underestimated. EclipseLink has solved a large part of this problem through its new JPA-RS feature which integrates JAX-RS, JAXB and JPA to allow developers to expose their persistent entities over REST with support for all lifecycle operations and query execution. In building JPA-RS, EclipseLink faced and overcame many of the challenges developers face when realizing a REST resource model, addressing HATEOS, and the infrastructure for JSON and XML binding.