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.