What is Restlet?
Restlet is an open-source framework for building RESTful web APIs in Java. It aims to simplify the creation and deployment of RESTful web services by handling routing, serialization, server communication, and client libraries:
- Routing - Restlet provides a routing API to map RESTful resources to request handlers, so you don't have to handle URL parsing manually.
- Serialization - It has built-in support for serializing and deserializing common data formats like JSON and XML to/from Java objects.
- Communication - Restlet abstracts away the underlying HTTP server and client handling, allowing you to focus on the API logic rather than communication code.
- Client libraries - It includes client libraries for several programming languages that handle the underlying HTTP communication.
Key features include comprehensive API support for JAX-RS and JAXB, declarative validation via Bean Validation, Automatic documentation via Swagger/OpenAPI integration, and Spring framework integration.
Overall, Restlet simplifies building and consuming REST APIs in Java by handling much of the boilerplate code. This allows faster development and deployment. It has an active open source community and is used by many large companies.
HTTPie for Terminal, Postman, Insomnia REST Client, soapUI, ApiOpenStudio, Thunder Client, Hoppscotch, Stoplight, Advanced REST Client, RapidAPI for Mac, Kreya are some alternatives to Restlet.