If simple CRUD functionality in a web service is all you need, you are right that you shouldn't be writing this and you don't need to if you choose the right rapid application dev framework. I currently do Java dev and even for the bad rap it gets as far as rapid dev, I have used Spring Roo, which is sort of a Java-Spring knock off of Ruby on Rails and it can generate JSON web services for you for your model layer. You can then implement custom validators, etc but the boilerplate services, etc are all done for you. I believe other languages have similar frameworks that can do this as well