Mike Zamansky is working on a Web app. As with most such apps, it has a front end that provides the UI and gathers requests for the server, and a back end that runs on the server and does the “computations”. Apps like that can be tricky to develop because it’s hard to write the front end without some way of feeding it data from the server. On the other hand, it’s hard to communicate with the server without a front end.

There are plenty of workarounds of various utility but Zamansky decided to try out restclient in the 60th video of his Using Emacs Series. Using restclient is a win because you don’t have to leave your development environment and there’s very little cutting and pasting between screens. It’s a nice tool. You can type in, say, a GET request and it will send it to the server, show you what displayable data comes back, and let’s you see the transaction metadata such as the return status.

I mostly concern myself with server-side applications so I don’t have much chance to use something like restclient but I’ve been intrigued with it since I saw Magnar Sveen’s Emacs Rocks! video about restclient in 2014. If you have a need to communicate with a server interactively, be sure to watch both Sveen’s and Zamansky’s videos. They’re both entertaining and informative. The Emacs Rocks! video is 2 minutes, 23 seconds and Zamansky’s is 14 minutes, 36 seconds. They’re well worth the time to watch and may show you a way to save a lot of development time and effort.

UPDATE : Clarified the front-end/back-end relationship a bit.