I have been experimenting with some improvements and cleanup of the rest classes as per recent discussion over the mailing list and irc. I have attached the result to the following jira issue:
http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOS-2579
Review from David and those interested would be appreciated. I tried to give a comprehensive overview of the changes in the issue description.
Also note that these changes are not intended for the very short term. If the feedback is positive I hope to perhaps implement them for the next release.
-Justin
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Justin Deoliveira
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org
Enterprise support for open source geospatial.