RESTCoREST

RESTCoREST is a modular framework for building and consuming RESTful web services. It integrates a core REST engine with a pluggable extension layer named CoREST, which provides cross-cutting capabilities such as authentication, authorization, policy enforcement, rate limiting, and orchestration of calls across services. The design emphasizes explicit resource modeling, clear versioning, and interoperability across languages and platforms.

Originating in the early 2020s as an open-source project, RESTCoREST aims to reduce fragmentation in API design by decoupling the underlying REST semantics from service orchestration concerns. The CoREST layer is described as a set of composable components that can be attached to endpoints without changing their observable REST behavior.

At its core, RESTCoREST provides routing, content negotiation, serialization, and standardized error handling. The CoREST extension adds modular adapters and plugins for authentication schemes, authorization policies, auditing, caching, and service orchestration. A central registry tracks resource schemas, extension modules, and version mappings to enable dynamic discovery and tooling. The framework supports hypermedia controls, versioned APIs, and generation of client libraries and documentation from schemas.

Key features include language-agnostic routing and serialization, API documentation generation, pluggable authentication (for example API keys, OAuth2), policy-based access control, rate limiting, caching adapters, and testing utilities.

Community and industry adoption has been limited but growing in certain enterprise and academic settings. Proponents praise RESTCoREST for modularity, reuse of components, and strong interoperability, while critics point to the learning curve of the plugin ecosystem and the potential for complexity when multiple CoREST extensions are combined.

See also REST, API design, microservices.