The Registry Data Access Protocol (RDAP) is a successor protocol to Whois, ratified by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in March, 2015. At present, all 5 Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) operate RDAP services, and ICANN is finalizing plans for operation of RDAP services by all domain registries. More information on RDAP can be found here.

ARIN has played a major role in the standardization of RDAP, and as a consequence developed some open source software for RDAP:

  • NicInfo is a command line RDAP client.
  • The RDAP Bootstrap Server is a server that issues HTTP redirects based on the IANA RDAP bootstrap files. This server is useful for simple RDAP clients and scripts that do not wish to incorporate RDAP bootstrap processes.
  • The RDAP WebSPA is a prototype web-based RDAP client written in Javascript.