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Restlet, a provider of API framework technology, announced the general availability of its API platform, which consists of the new Restlet Studio, APISpark and Restlet Framework.
Available today, Restlet Studio is a browser-based integrated development environment (IDE) for APIs. APISpark is Restlet’s recently launched platform as a service (PaaS) for Web APIs. And Restlet Framework is an open-source framework for developing APIs in Java.
Restlet’s API platform addresses the growing need for consumers and corporate users to access data and business logic in real time from any application on any device, mobile or desktop, said Jerome Louvel, founder of Restlet. The Restlet API Platform was built based on feedback from members of the 100,000-developer Restlet community, he added.
“Businesses are rapidly embracing the digital world by including their customers in key business processes,” said Matthieu Hug, CEO of Fujitsu RunMyProcess. “APIs are the glue that makes this new type of digital connection possible. We have been leveraging Restlet’s API platform to optimize the development and management of the Web APIs we expose to our clients, and are extremely pleased to see the addition of new components that increase the solution’s API lifecycle coverage.”
Developers can get their first experience with the Restlet API platform through Restlet Studio. The Web-based IDE for APIs can be accessed for free here. Designed by experts on REST architecture, the new API crafting environment allows developers to rapidly create API implementations by automatically building configuration files, client SDKs and server skeletons without having to master Swagger, RESTful API Modeling Language (RAML), JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) or Yet Another Multi-column Layout (YAML).
“Restlet Studio provides a Web console that lets you visually craft Web APIs,” Louvel said in a blog post on the IDE. “No need to learn Swagger or RAML syntaxes in JSON or YAML to get started, Restlet Studio generates them for you in addition to server skeletons to bootstrap your API implementation and client SDKs to facilitate the consumption of your API.”
Restlet Studio integrates with APISpark and Restlet Framework, providing a platform for the entire lifecycle of API development, including design, development, hosting and management. It will benefit both developers who need to expose data but are not experts in the REST architecture style as well as API experts who already use Restlet Framework to develop APIs.
“We developed Restlet Studio after hearing from API developers that they needed to streamline the design of APIs through a simple, visual environment that supports the most popular API languages,” Louvel said. “While it brings tremendous value as a stand-alone product, Restlet Studio is also a key component of Restlet’s API platform through which developers are able to create and manage APIs—and share them easily with other developers.”
Key features of Restlet Studio include a visual designer to define and edit the endpoints, methods and representations of RESTful APIs; support for content negotiation between JSON, YAML, XML and more; as well as full page user interfaces built using AngularJS with scrollable navigation panels that allow developers to easily deal with complex APIs and large numbers of resources. Restlet Studio also features an API language translator that allows switching back and forth between Swagger and RAML with automatic, one-click synchronization; a server skeleton generator that takes the API design and automatically creates code to bootstrap the API implementation; and automatic client SDK generation using APISpark and Swagger tool chains.
APISpark is a cloud service for developers seeking to quickly publish and manage APIs, and businesses that want to give application and Website developers access to their data. Anyone can go to the APISpark site and use a Web browser to securely create and publish REST APIs in minutes. The Restlet Framework is a popular API development framework with 2 million downloads and a community of 100,000 developers. The framework is freely available from the Restlet Website or on GitHub. Restlet Studio is free to use without restriction. Running in a browser, it requires no installation or configuration.