Buying through REST: applying REST to the Enterprise

Posted on 13. Apr, 2010 by guilhermesilveira in restful

REST was a research result that left us with an open question, as its researcher suggested: it beautifully solves a lot of problems, but how to apply it on contemporary concerns that enterprise have?

REST Applied

After many talks, I have summed up a model, derived from REST constraints, that allows one to measure how his entire system (client and server) achieves a REST architecture.

The following video shows an example on how to start from a typical non restful architecture to adopting REST constraints and creating a buying process in any REST server.

[vimeo 10883098]

So what is the power behing applied REST?

“Rest Applied” as I have exemplified, solves our contemporary concerns, filling the gap between Roy’s description and application’s usage, opening up a new world of possibilities.

The same way that REST ideas, although they were not called REST at that time, allowed web crawling to be an amazing client, “REST applied”, as described, can change the way our applications communicate with servers.

Why did we miss it? Because Roy’s description goes for with crawling examples, which benefit directly from content type negotiation. i.e. different languages, same resource and google post ranking it:

“In fact, the application details are hidden from the server by the generic connector interface, and thus a user agent could equally be an automated robot performing information retrieval for an indexing service, a personal agent looking for data that matches certain criteria, or a maintenance spider busy patrolling the information for broken references or modified content [39].”

But, “Not surprisingly, this exactly matches the user interface of a hypermedia browser. “… the client adapts itself to its current representation – limited to the client’s cleverness.

REST Applied takes those ideas to solve our problems, as some examples from Rest in Practice and procurement through rest.

Frameworks/libraries used

Restfulie gives better HTTP support to http libraries and provides a REST frameworks while Mikyung allows you to create your REST clients. With both of them you are ready to apply REST to enterprise problems.

Mikyung stands for “beauty capital” in Korean, in a attempt to reproduce what a beautiful rest client could look like when following REST constraints.

Tags: hypermedia, media type, mikyung, rest, restfulie, semantic, video