dromara/forest

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1941 stars · 239 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Forest is a high-level, lightweight declarative HTTP client framework for Java that lets developers send HTTP requests by defining annotated interfaces and calling local-looking methods. It supports multiple backends (HttpClient, OkHttp), template expressions, interceptors, JSON/XML/Protobuf serialization, OAuth2, file upload/download, async calls, and Spring/Spring Boot integration.

Use cases

• call third-party REST APIs from Java without boilerplate
• define HTTP clients as annotated interfaces like Feign or Retrofit
• send GET/POST/PUT/DELETE requests declaratively in Spring Boot
• upload and download files over HTTP in Java
• serialize request and response bodies as JSON, XML, or Protobuf
• handle OAuth2 authentication for external APIs
• send asynchronous HTTP requests with callbacks
• consume Server-Sent Events (SSE) endpoints in Java

When to choose

• you want a Feign/Retrofit-style declarative HTTP client without Spring Cloud or a registry
• you need flexible template expressions and custom annotations for request definitions
• you want pluggable JSON/XML converters (Fast, Jackson, Gson, JAXB)
• you need both programmatic and declarative request styles in one framework

When to avoid

• you need a reactive, non-blocking HTTP client with backpressure (e.g., WebFlux WebClient)
• your project is not on the JVM or does not use Java 8+
• you only need simple one-off requests where a plain HttpClient or OkHttp call suffices
• you require gRPC or binary RPC rather than HTTP/REST

Facets

framework · maturity active

http-client serialization middleware web-framework web-development backend apis developer-tools jvm cross-platform declarative-http-client annotations spring-boot-starter okhttp httpclient rest-client feign-alternative retrofit-alternative oauth2 file-upload sse async-requests spring

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