WriteByHumans

RIP RestTemplate: Why It’s Deprecated and What to Use Instead

April 19, 2025

If you’ve been working with Spring for a while, you’ve probably bumped into RestTemplate for making HTTP requests. It was the go-to tool for a long time—easy to use, simple to set up, and got the job done.

But as of Spring 5 and beyond, the Spring team has been politely telling us to let it go. Yes, RestTemplate is officially deprecated and no longer the recommended way to make HTTP calls.

So what happened? Why the breakup? Let’s dig in.

What is RestTemplate?

In case you’re new here, RestTemplate is (or was) a synchronous HTTP client provided by Spring. You could use it to easily call REST APIs like:

RestTemplate restTemplate = new RestTemplate();
String response = restTemplate.getForObject("https://api.example.com/data", String.class);

Straightforward, right?

So… Why Is It Deprecated?

1. Synchronous = Blocking = Meh

RestTemplate is built on top of the old Java HttpURLConnection and Apache’s HTTP client. These are blocking I/O operations, which means your threads are just sitting around waiting for a response. That’s super inefficient, especially for high-throughput applications like microservices.

In today’s world of reactive and event-driven architectures, this is a big no-no.

2. Reactive Programming Is the New Cool

Spring 5 introduced WebClient as part of the reactive WebFlux module. WebClient is non-blocking, supports reactive streams, and is perfect for asynchronous communication.

WebClient client = WebClient.create("https://api.example.com");
Mono<String> response = client.get()
    .uri("/data")
    .retrieve()
    .bodyToMono(String.class);

Mono and Flux might look a little scary at first, but once you go reactive, you’ll never go back. It scales like a beast and plays nicely with modern reactive systems.

3. RestTemplate Is in Maintenance Mode️

The Spring team has put RestTemplate into maintenance-only mode. That means no new features, only critical bug fixes. You don’t want to base your shiny new app on a dead tech, right?

What Should You Use Instead?

Use WebClient from the spring-webflux module
It’s the future and it’s powerful, even in non-reactive applications. Yep, even if you’re not building a full-blown reactive app, you can still use WebClient in a synchronous way if needed (via .block(), though not recommended for full reactive use).

TL;DR

RestTemplate is deprecated because it’s blocking and not built for reactive systems.
WebClient is the new recommended way to make HTTP requests in Spring.
Even if you’re not fully into reactive programming, start learning WebClient. Future you will thank you.

Final Thoughts

The tech world doesn’t sit still. While RestTemplate served us well, it’s time to embrace modern, scalable solutions. Give WebClient a try in your next project—you might even fall in love with reactive programming along the way.