JAX-RS 1.0 (JSR-311), JAX-RS 2.0 (JSR-339), and JAX-RS 2.1 (JSR-370) are Java Community Process (JCP) specifications. In 2017, the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) specifications, including JAX-RS, were transferred to the Eclipse Foundation ( Java EE Moves to the Eclipse Foundation), Java EE became Jakarta Enterprise Edition, and new governing committees under the umbrella of the Eclipse Jakarta EE Platform were constituted. For JAX-RS, the specifications are provided by the Jakarta RESTful Web Services committee. The first specification released under the authority of Jakarta RESTful Web Services was Jakarta RESTful Web Services 2.1, that being essentially identical to JAX-RS 2.1.

RESTEasy is a portable implementation of these specifications which can run in any Servlet container. Tighter integration with the WildFly application server is also available to make the user experience nicer in that environment. RESTEasy also comes with additional features on top of the plain old specifications.