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User guide
- Part 1 - Introduction
- Part 2 - Core Restlet
- Part 3 - Restlet Editions
- Part 4 - Restlet Extensions
- Appendices
- Tutorials
- Javadocs
- Change Log
First client
Introduction
As we mentioned in the introduction, the Restlet Framework is at the same time a client and a server framework. For example, you can easily work with remote resources using its HTTP client connector.
A connector in REST is a software element that enables the communication between components, typically by implementing one side of a network protocol. Restlet provides several implementations of client connectors based on existing open-source projects. The connectors section lists all available client and server connectors and explain how to use and configure them.
Here we will retrieve the representation of an existing resource and output it in the JVM console:
// Outputting the content of a Web page
new ClientResource("http://restlet.com").get().write(System.out);
If you are running your client behind a proxy, please check this page to pick an HTTP client that can be configured. The internal HTTP client doesn’t support proxies at the moment.
The next example sets some preferences in your client call, like a referrer URI:
// Create the client resource
ClientResource resource = new ClientResource("http://restlet.com");
// Customize the referrer property
resource.setReferrerRef("http://www.mysite.org");
// Write the response entity on the console
resource.get().write(System.out);
After those first two steps, let’s now develop a more complete Restlet application, taking advantage of the various editions of the Restlet Framework.