Preface

When I had a chance to use the Mosaic web browser way back in 1994, I fell in love with the web at first sight and became interested in HTML and the way the W3C was driving the growth of the web along with the IETF. A year later, I discovered Java by reading Sun’s white paper and was convinced that it would lead to a great future. I started using it professionally to write a web load-testing tool using CORBA and an HTTP proxy.

In 2001, while reading Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee, I was hooked by his grand vision of a read-write Semantic Web and started to think about the best way to help it come about. In 2004, I built a website in my spare time called Semalink which bridged the classic web of documents with the semantic web of data. As I wanted to stay true to the principles of the web, I read more and more about REST and the core HTTP and URI standards and realized that the Servlet API had too large a gap applying those principles. That’s when Restlet emerged as a higher-level Java API derived directly from REST and HTTP. This was very helpful, so I thought about sharing it with others. I believed that it could radically change the way we develop web applications, in the same way that REST was radically changing the way I was thinking about the web.

After announcing the Restlet Framework on December 2005 in an article on TheServerSide website, I hoped that this open source project, the first REST framework for Java, would contribute to the success of REST in the Java world. I wasn’t sure how the Java community would welcome it since the industry was strongly behind Java EE (including Servlet, JSP, and Spring MVC) and WS-* (based on the SOAP protocol) technologies.

Feedback was quick and mostly positive, suggesting features and leading me to dedicate more time to this project than I had initially planned. While REST was gaining wider support, from early adopters to the whole industry, Restlet matured by broadening its scope of features and by growing its community. In 2007, my friend Thierry Boileau joined me fulltime as a core developer, and one year later we formally created a company to provide professional services to the Restlet community, ensuring that we could dedicate even more time to Restlet.

Early on, users of the framework asked for better and more complete documentation and it became clear that we needed to make serious efforts on this front. At the end of 2008, we started to look for a publisher who would support our idea for a Restlet book. When Guillaume Laforge, head of Groovy development, told us that Manning was looking for exciting new technology to add to its list, it was clear that a “Restlet in Action” book would be ideal, especially with Manning’s Early Access Program (MEAP) that would give the community access to the electronic version of the draft manuscript, and provide us continuous and valuable feedback during the writing process.

Philippe Mougin, a web services expert, joined us for a few months and contributed important content on REST, including proper URI design and a comparison with the RPC style. Also, Bruno Harbulot, a PhD from the University of Manchester who had been instrumental during the design of the Restlet security API, contributed the initial content for the chapter on security.

Later in 2010, Thierry Templier, a Java EE expert and author of several books published by Manning, started to collaborate with us on the Restlet project and became the third coauthor, contributing two chapters on the cloud, GWT, and Android, as well as content on Spring integration, OSGi deployment, and security. He is now part of our team, focusing on the development of our new APISpark Platform as a Service (PaaS) and on editions of the Restlet Framework for JavaScript and OSGi.

In addition, Tim Peierls, coauthor of Java Concurrency in Practice and a key contributor in the Restlet community, provided valuable technical feedback on our draft manuscript. He also contributed an introduction to chapter 1 and worked hard to help us improve the quality of the English in the manuscript.

Finally, after three years of intense effort, Restlet in Action is ready for a new life in the world of bookstores and libraries. Speaking for all the coauthors and all the contributors to this book, I hope that you will enjoy reading it and developing RESTful web APIs using the Restlet Framework.

JÉRÔME LOUVEL