Looking for JSON, ReST, (and in-memory RDF) frameworks

Currently writing a number of small web-services to do various informatics tasks (more detailed post to come). Fortunately I'm not the one having to deal with 3rd-party SOAP apis! Still I do need to do various XML and JSON parsing, and not having addressed the latter before I've gone looking for libraries.

Currently I am about to start using Jackson, but was wondering if anyone had any warnings, advice, or recommended alternatives? In the course of looking at what was out there I have also come across Restlet, a ReST framework that seems like it is well worth the time to figure out and deploy, so I will probably be doing that soon as well, any warnings or advice on this will be welcome.

One of the nice things about Restlet is its support for RDF. Granted it doesn't support querying, and the terminology in the interface is a bit confused, but it does use its native Resource interface for URIRefs, so it should integrate well. OTOH, if it does prove useful as a ReST framework, I can see myself writing a quick Sesame or Mulgara extension, as there is only so much you can do with RDF before you need a query and/or data-binding interface.

Deploying to tomcat using maven

This is a note to capture the process I am currently using to build and deploy a basic web application to tomcat for development.

1. Create simple web app using archetype.
   

   mvn archetype:create ... -DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-webapp

2. Add server to ~/.m2/settings.xml

     <servers>
       <server>
         <id>local-tomcat</id>
         <username>username</username>
         <password>password</password>
       </server>
     </servers>
   

3. Add server to toplevel pom.xml

     <build>
       ...
       <plugins>
         <plugin>
           <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
           <artifactId>tomcat-maven-plugin</artifactId>
           <version>1.0-beta-1</version>
           <configuration>
             <server>local-tomcat</server>
           </configuration>
         </plugin>
       </plugins>
     </build>
   

4. compile, test, deploy, and subsequently redeploy

     $ mvn compile
     $ mvn test
     $ mvn tomcat:deploy
     $ mvn tomcat:redeploy
   

Of course what I would dearly love to know is how you configure a server url in the settings.xml file. The documentation I can find (http://mojo.codehaus.org/tomcat-maven-plugin/configuration.html) describes how to use a custom url, and how to configure authentication information. What it doesn't do is explain how you can do both at the same time, and all my attempts have resulted in XML validation errors when trying to run maven --- if I figure it out I'll update this post.