Appendix A. Overview of the Restlet Framework
This appendix continues the tour of the Restlet Framework started in the first chapter. It begins with a description of Restlet’s core module (which provides the Restlet API and its implementation, also known as the Restlet Engine) and extensions built on top of the core module. We then present the notion of editions, which is the way for the Restlet Framework to adapt to various technical contexts while still providing the same high-level API. We conclude this appendix by explaining the versioning scheme used, including the release tags such as stable, testing, and unstable.
The most important part of the Restlet Framework is its Restlet API. Once you learn it, you can understand most Restlet code and develop both client-side and server-side applications—or make use of many protocols beside HTTP. In contrast with the JAX-RS API, the Servlet API, or the HttpURLConnection class, Restlet uses a single uniform API, making it easy to write not only servers, but clients and even web proxies (applications acting both as server and client) in order to build cache systems or web API mashups.