Question

I am trying to create a java application to read the information from ARIN using an IP Address. I see ARIN is using RESTful Web Services to get the IP information but I am not sure what I need to do to start. Some people are talking about RESTLET, other people about JAX-RS,etc. Can you please help me to take me in the right direction? Thanks!

Answer 1

Restlet also has a client API to interact with a remote RESTful application. See the classes Client, ClientResource for more details. For this, you need to have following jar files from Restlet distribution:

• org.restlet: main Restlet jar
• org.restlet.ext.xml: Restlet support of XML
• org.restlet.ext.json: Restlet support of JSON. In this case, the JSON jar present in libraries folder is also required.

If I use the documentation located at this address https://www.arin.net/resources/whoisrws/whois_api.html#whoisrws. Here is a simple Restlet code you can use:

ClientResource cr = new ClientResource("http://whois.arin.net/rest/poc/KOSTE-ARIN");
Representation repr = cr.get();
// Display the XML content
System.out.println(repr.getText());

or

ClientResource cr = new ClientResource("http://whois.arin.net/rest/poc/KOSTE-ARIN.txt");
Representation repr = cr.get();
// Display the text content
System.out.println(repr.getText());

Restlet also provides some support at XML level. So you can have access to hints contained in the XML in a simple way, as described below:

ClientResource cr = new ClientResource("http://whois.arin.net/rest/poc/KOSTE-ARIN");
Representation repr = cr.get();
DomRepresentation dRepr = new DomRepresentation(repr);
Node firstNameNode = dRepr.getNode("//firstName");
Node lastNameNode = dRepr.getNode("//lastName");
System.out.println(firstNameNode.getTextContent()+" "+lastNameNode.getTextContent());

Note that you can finally handle content negotiation (conneg) since it seems supported by your REST service:

ClientResource cr = new ClientResource("http://whois.arin.net/rest/poc/KOSTE-ARIN");
Representation repr = cr.get(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON);

In this case, your representation object contains JSON formatted data. In the same way than the DomRepresentation, there is a JsonRepresentation to inspect this representation content.

Hope it helps you.
Thierry