The client/server paradigm in distributed systems leads to multi-stakeholder architectures with messages exchanged over connections between client applications and services. In practice, there are many hidden obstacles for client developers caused by unstable network connections, unavailable or faulty services or limited connectivity. Even if many frameworks and middleware solutions have already been suggested as corrective, the rapid development of clients to (almost) RESTful services remains challenging, especially when mobile devices and wireless telecommunications are involved. In this paper we introduce RAFT-REST, a conceptual framework aimed at engineers of clients to RESTful services. RAFT-REST reduces the effort to achieve reliable, adaptive and fault-tolerant service consumption. The framework is applied and validated with ReSup, a fully implemented flavour for Java clients which run on the desktop and on Android mobile devices. We show that by using the framework, message loss can be reduced significantly with tolerable delay, which contributes to a higher quality of experience.
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