In the world of Spring Boot, making HTTP requests to external services is a common task. Traditionally, developers have relied on RestTemplate for this purpose. However, with the evolution of the Spring Framework, a new and more powerful way to handle HTTP requests has emerged: the WebClient. In Spring Boot 3.2, a new addition called RestClient builds upon WebClient, providing a more intuitive and modern approach to consuming RESTful services.
Origins of RestTemplate
RestTemplate has been a staple in the Spring ecosystem for years. It's a synchronous client for making HTTP requests and processing responses. With RestTemplate, developers could easily interact with RESTful APIs using familiar Java syntax. However, as applications became more asynchronous and non-blocking, the limitations of RestTemplate started to become apparent.