Appendix B. Installing the Restlet Framework
The goal of this appendix is to help you install the Restlet Framework and get started with it, from a tooling perspective. We describe several ways to retrieve the framework artifacts, called distributions. We guide you through the basic installation and usage steps for major IDEs, showing in detail how to run a first Restlet program.
We also review recommended testing tools and illustrate their basic use with Restlet. This provides an opportunity to focus on the key task of debugging Restlet-based programs.
The Restlet Framework is composed of a core module that depends only on Java SE, plus a set of extensions that generally depend on third-party libraries. Initially, the framework was distributed as a zip containing the Java binaries and source code of all of these artifacts. Then an automated installer for Windows was added, later a Maven repository, and recently an Eclipse update site. This section details these distributions and gives hints about how to use them. We’ll begin the tour with the Maven repository.