restin

RESTin is a software specification and accompanying tooling designed to streamline the development of RESTful web services. It provides a coherent set of conventions for modeling resources, HTTP methods, status codes, and hypermedia interactions, with a focus on consistency, interoperability, and maintainability. The project promotes alignment with the REST architectural style, including stateless servers, cacheable responses, and uniform interfaces.

Core components include a resource model vocabulary, a routing and request-handling layer, serialization adapters, error handling semantics, and automation for API documentation and testing. It supports content negotiation and can generate or validate API definitions against OpenAPI or similar schemas. The design emphasizes pluggable components and language-agnostic bindings, enabling libraries in multiple programming languages.

RESTin originated as an open-source initiative to provide a shared approach to REST API design. Development is community-driven with contributions through public repositories and discussion forums. The project is released under an open-source license and welcomes new contributors and adopters. The ecosystem includes sample implementations, reference guides, and tutorials.

It is used for building microservices, public-facing APIs, or internal services where consistent REST semantics and good documentation are valued. Proponents cite improved consistency, easier onboarding, and better tooling. Critics may point to an upfront learning curve or perceived constraints compared with more lightweight or bespoke API patterns.

Related topics include REST, RESTful API, OpenAPI, hypermedia, and API design.