Overview

User guide overview

This is the official User Guide for version 2.4 of the Restlet Framework.

This document is edited in a collaborative way via this GitHub repository as a set of Markdown pages.

We are very happy to have you as a new user and hope that you will have as much fun learning and using this technology as we had designing and developing it. Be ready to radically change the way you think and build web applications. With Restlet in our backpack, we are certain that you will enter the REST and Web API world with the best toolkit available!

As a truly open source project, we not only consider you as a user but as a potential contributor. You will soon find ways to contribute back to the project, by filing a bug or enhancement reports, by submitting documentation or code improvements or by helping other users or developers in the mailing lists. Every contribution is valuable to the community and we give credit back to our team by listing all the contributors on our team page.

Let’s get started and again: welcome to the Restlet Team !

Framework overview

Restlet is a comprehensive yet lightweight RESTful web API framework for Java that lets you embrace the architecture style of the Web (REST) and benefit from its simplicity and scalability. By using our innovative framework, you can start blending your web services, web sites and web clients into uniform web applications!

Restlet has a light core but thanks to its pluggable extension, it is also a comprehensive REST framework for Java. It supports all REST concepts (Resource, Representation, Connector, Component, etc.) and is suitable for both client and server Web applications.

It supports major Web standards like HTTP, SMTP, XML, JSON, OData, OAuth, RDF, RSS, WADL, and Atom.

Many extensions are also available to integrate with Servlet, Spring, Jetty, Simple, JAXB, JAX-RS, JiBX, Velocity, FreeMarker, XStream, Jackson, SLF4J, SDC and many more!

Special editions for Android, GWT, GAE, Java SE, Java EE and OSGi are also available and kept synchronized with an automated porting process.

Community support

If you can’t find an answer to your question in this document, please use our discussion lists and read the recommended books.

We especially recommend our Restlet in Action book published by Manning.

Professional support

If you can’t wait to get an answer or need to keep your questions confidential, you can also obtain private support by buying a professional support plan from the creator of the Restlet Framework.