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What is Rest.li?

Rest.li is a REST+JSON framework for building robust, scalable service architectures using dynamic discovery and simple asynchronous APIs.

Rest.li fills a niche for building RESTful service architectures at scale, offering a developer workflow for defining data and REST APIs that promotes uniform interfaces, consistent data modeling, type-safety, and compatibility checked API evolution.

No, Really. What is Rest.li?

Oh, you want to see some code, don't you?

Basically, Rest.li is a framework where you define schemas for your data:

    {
      "name" : "Greeting", "namespace" : "com.example.greetings", "type" : "record",
      "fields" : [
        { "name" : "message", "type" : "string" }
      ]
    }

Write servers:

    @RestLiCollection(name = "greetings")
    class GreetingsResource extends CollectionResourceTemplate<Long, Greeting> {
      public Greeting get(Long key) {
        return new Greeting().setMessage("Good morning!");
      }
    }

And then write clients:

    Greeting response = restClient.sendRequest(new GreetingsBuilders.get().id(1L)).getResponseEntity();
    System.out.println(response.getMessage());

And get all the benefits of a robust, scalable REST+JSON framework.

Twitter Account

Follow us @rest_li

Discussion Group

Linkedin Rest.li Group

Quickstart Guides and Examples

• Quickstart Guide - a step-by-step tutorial on the basics

Design Principles

• Promote uniform interfaces through consistent data modeling and REST conventions
• Seamlessly integrate a JSON serializable data layer including a data schema language and generated language bindings
• Provide published interface definitions, generated from server code
• Make calling services dead simple with generated type-safe client bindings
• Versioning with automated compatibility checking
• Simple asynchronous API
• Dynamic discovery with load balancing

Requirements

• Java 1.6+
• Gradle 1.8+ or SBT 0.13.0+

Documentation

• Rest.li
  • Getting Started
    • Quickstart: A Tutorial Introduction to Rest.li
  • Architecture Intro
    • Server-side Data Flow
    • Client-side Data Flow
    • Development Flow
  • Server Framework
    • Resources
    • Resource Types
    • Base Operations - Create, Get, Update, Delete
    • Finders
    • Actions
  • Client Framework
    • Generated client request builders
    • RestClient
    • [Error Semantics] (wiki/Rest.li-User-Guide#error-semantics)
  • Projections
  • Projections in Java
  • Partial Updates - How to create patches
  • Dependency Injection incl. Guice & Spring integration
  • Compression incl. snappy, deflate, gzip
  • Validation
  • Language Support
    • Java - Native
    • Scala
  • Specifications
    • Wire protocol
    • .restspec.json format (aka "idl")
  • Tools
    • IDL generation
    • Client binding generation
    • Gradle build integration
    • SBT build integration (provided in a separate github project)
• Data Schema and Templates
  • Schema Language
  • JSON Serialization
  • Validation
  • DataMaps
  • Data Templates
• Dynamic Discovery (D2)
• Request/Response (R2)
• Best Practices
  • Modeling resources
• FAQs
  • Data FAQ
• [Checking Out/Building] (wiki/Building-with-Rest.li)
• How to Contribute