Meaning of“A type-safe HTTP client for Android and Java” in Retrofit 2.0

Question

Can someone please explain meaning of Retrofit\'s tagline :

A type-safe HTTP client for Android and Java

Answer 1

Example: A call is made to a API endpoint to return all books by authors.

1.GET /articles?include=author HTTP/1.1

Response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-Type: application/vnd.api+json { "data": [{ "type": "articles", "id": "1", "attributes": { "title": "JSON API paints my bikeshed!", "body": "The shortest article. Ever.", "created": "2015-05-22T14:56:29.000Z", "updated": "2015-05-22T14:56:28.000Z" }, "relationships": { "author": { "data": {"id": "42", "type": "people"} } } }], "included": [ { "type": "people", "id": "42", "attributes": { "name": "John", "age": 80, "gender": "male" } } ] }

As you can see, the response has some data in the form of keys and values.

Java language usually has built in libraries to parse such information. But, here is where Retrofit makes it much more easy.

Retrofit is type-safe. Type safety means that the compiler will validate types while compiling, and throw an error if you try to assign the wrong type to a variable.