Misusing Restlet as a Lightweight Alternative to Servlets

I was struck by just how easy (and how lightweight!!) using Restlet was for processing simple HTTP requests:

...
Component component = new Component();
component.getServers().add(Protocol.HTTP, 8080);
component.getDefaultHost().attachDefault(new Restlet() {
  public void handle(Request request, Response response) {
    Map parameters = request.getResourceRef().getQueryAsForm().getValuesMap();
    // fun with parameters here
  }
});
component.start();

Isn't that sweet?! No web.xml, no context.xml, very very fast spin-up time, multi-threading out of the box, 200 status by default, 500 status by default on exception, no session junk. Nice.

The only real gotcha was that you seem to have to provide some sort of response (which is probably a good idea anyway). If you don't you get server shutdown complaints in your log (even though it still continues to do the right thing). You can respond with plain text like this:

response.setEntity( "some response text", MediaType.TEXT_PLAIN );