Hi Matt, I think you did an excellent job of marshalling some cogent and specific arguments in favor of Restlet and how it can be used.
On a broader plane ... I think the key advantage of Restlet is that it makes it very simple and lightweight to implement a REST-patterned web service, and encourages RESTful application design. Because the framework maps so literally and simplistically to REST concepts, it provides a useful barometer of how well your software design leverages the REST principles of the Web. I find that a design that seems to be a forced fit for Restlet is usually a forced fit for REST in general, and vice versa. So one question for me would be whether RESTful design is a core element of the value proposition for your app. If you're just trying to express a RESTful API but not necessarily plumb and architect the entire application using REST principles, that's an area where JAX-RS suffices. (I may be tarred for that statement, but it's how I see it). If I sit down and scratch design an application knowing that it will be based on Restlet and some kind of rich client, I find that a lot of complexities can be pared away and my stack gets a lot lighter. This shocks a lot of Java developers who look at the application after the fact. Where's the JEE container? Good gosh almighty, where's the DATABASE? What do you use for session management? How can this thing possibly be so fast, so powerful, and fit in a couple of megabytes? Are you sure you wrote this in Java? But, really, when you're making a Web application and you spend most of your time actually writing one, instead of dealing with impedance mismatch between paradigms, the results are great. Restlet encourages this, and that's why I use it. In a mission where there's an established world order based on RMI or Servlet/JSP or SOAP or XML-RPC ... I don't generally try to bring Restlet to the table. Here, I might actually break out the Jersey. Well, truth be told, more likely, I'd encourage a competitor to take on the project :-) - Rob On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 1:02 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > Anyways.. This was a long rant but if anybody has some thoughts about how > to convince my work to use RESTLET over others that would be great. > ------------------------------------------------------ http://restlet.tigris.org/ds/viewMessage.do?dsForumId=4447&dsMessageId=1044970
