Features

focused on REST

Building a RESTful API is dead easy with RESTX, it has all the defaults you can expect from a REST framework: serving / consuming JSON is super easy, query and path parameters are almost too simple to use, you get a strong routing and filtering mechanism and no conversation state is kept on the web server (aka stateless web server).

This implies that it’s not a general web framework, i.e., there is no templating mechanism. It’s better use with a JavaScript framework on the client side, and you can always use any other templating mechanism to serve your pages.

lightweight

RESTX is based on a “no reflection” architecture, instead it uses annotation processing and compile-time source generation. Thanks to this approach we eliminate complex call stacks and the many Proxy / Reflection calls, which makes it very lightweight in terms of runtime overhead compared to programming directly against the servlet API. There’s also (almost) no classpath scanning (which leads to a faster startup time).

Another reason for choosing annotation processing over reflection is that even with some “magic” you can always view the generated source, you can clearly see in your IDE the caller of your API methods.

modular and pluggable

RESTX is very modular, you pick up only what you want. Moreover, it has a very simple plugin architecture, which makes it easy to use existing plugins as well as writing your own that you can contribute to the community!

blazing fast

Everything is compiled, we always keep performance into account during the design, especially startup time.

However, the framework is not async-oriented. This is a design choice: most data access APIs are synchronous anyway (JDBC, Mongo java driver, …) and it’s easier to program, especially for Java developers.

Async support is planned:

• through web socket with fallback support (probably with Atmosphere)
• through RXJava support (not a priority)

If you’d prefer a truly async-oriented framework, have a look at vert.x, Play2 or NodeJS.

amazing integration with MongoDB…

relying on Jackson and Jongo gives true symmetry between client and datastore payloads, plus some very cool features like data recording for easy integration testing

… but not only

restx is not specific to MongoDB, you can use it with any datastore with a Java API. There’s already a sample project using couchbase, and you can also use it with a relational database.

easy testing

a human readable declarative end to end tests support with a recording feature easing non regression tests

REST API documentation

as soon as you declare an endpoint, it is documented in the web console

… with innovation inside

the declarative tests are also used as a source of documentation, giving always working examples!

admin web console

monitoring, Dependency Injection container exploration, API documentation, recording console, log admin, …

enterprise friendly

pure Java, can be deployed as a simple servlet, you can even use it alongside another framework, good maven support, relationnal DB support (soon), integration with spring (soon)

… but not only

strong support for embedded/main launch, starts up in less than 0.5s, a very simple build tool agnostic module declaration with support for easyant, very easy to integrate with NoSQL database

type safe DI

features a small dependency injection engine, based on annotation processing and code generation

strong integration with google guava and joda time

because we can’t live without them

cloud friendly

ready to deploy on many cloud offerings (Cloudbees, heroku, …)

easy to setup

a command line helps to create new apps, compile and run them on the cloud

developer friendly

auto compile mode gives very fast feedback cycles, almost like with an interpreted language. Being pure Java you also have very good IDE support. And a special care has been given to developer experience, with good error management (try to send a badly formatted json when you use a POST or PUT get an idea). Moreover, the use of annotation processor allows to raise errors at compile time, if you mistype a Path parameter for instance.