if i understood correctly, you already create urls like
http://catalog.lib.ncsu.edu/record?id=1234565.
since cool urls are the ones that  don't change, you will still have
to support these. so i'd think an easy way to support the even cooler
http://catalog.lib.ncsu.edu/record/123456 would be to use something
like apache's mod_rewrite
(http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html) assuming you
use apache in front of whatever serves your java code.
regards,
robert

On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 6:22 AM, Emily Lynema <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I'm looking around for tools to implement cool uris in java. I've been
> studying the restlet framework tonight, and while it sounds cool, I think it
> would also require a complete re-write of an application that is currently
> based on the Servlet API. And, of course, I'm working under a time crunch.
>
> Is there anything out there to assist me in working with cool uris besides
> just using regular expressions when parsing URLs?
>
> For example, I'd like to create URLs like:
>
> http://catalog.lib.ncsu.edu/record/123456
>
> instead of:
>
> http://catalog.lib.ncsu.edu/record?id=1234565
>
> -emily
> --
> Emily Lynema
> Systems Librarian for Digital Projects
> Information Technology, NCSU Libraries
> 919-513-8031
> [log in to unmask]
>