Overview

Introduction

This chapter presents the Restlet API. It is a small set of packages, with classes, interfaces and enumerations that together provide a framework. This framework will guide you on the path to RESTful design and development. But be aware that you still need to understand REST in order to fully take advantage of the Restlet features. For this purpose, we recommend the book “RESTful Web Services” from O’Reilly (more information on the books we recommend). We even wrote a part of it covering Restlet usage.

For a more detailed presentation of the API, we recommend that you have a close look at its Javadocs available on the Restlet Web site. Below is a hierarchy diagram showing the main concepts of the API and their relationships:

Here is a diagram illustrating how the API composes components, connectors, virtual host and applications. Applications are in turn composed of resources.