Hi all,

Since Spring 3 was released in December last year, I have been trying out the new REST features in the MVC framework for a small commercial project involving implementing a few RESTful Web Services which consume XML and return XML views using JiBX. I plan to use either Hibernate or JDBC Templates for the data persistence.

As a Spring 2.0 developer, I have found Spring 3's (and 2.5's) new annotations way of doing things quite a paradigm shift and have personally found some of the new MVC annotation features difficult to get up to speed with for non-trivial applications - as such, I am often having to dig for information in forums and blogs that is not apparent from going through the reference guide or from the various Spring 3 REST examples on the web.

For deadline-driven production quality and mission critical applications implementing a RESTful architecture, should I be holding off from Spring 3 and rather be using mature JSR 311 (JAX-RS) compliant frameworks like RESTlet or Jersey for the REST layer of my code (together with Spring 2 / 2.5 to tie things together)? I had no problems using RESTlet 1.x in a previous project and it was quite easy to get up to speed with (no magic tricks behind the scenes), but when starting my current project it initially looked like the new REST stuff in Spring 3's MVC Framework would make life easier.

Do any of you out there have any advice to give on this? Does anyone know of any commercial / production-quality projects using, or having successfully delivered with, the new REST stuff in Spring 3's MVC Framework.

Many thanks

Glen