I was reading a couple of articles on how to use Yaws in a RESTful way, how Webmachine maps HTTP semantics to resources and all of them helped a lot to grasp the concept.
Example API in Zack Kessin's Building Web Applications with Erlang
Steve Vinoski's RESTful Services with Erlang and Yaws
Sheehy/Vinoski - Developing RESTful Web Services with Webmachine
This is the point where I got confused: it seems like that Webmachine as a good REST toolkit and Yaws as a mature web server would complement each other instead of writing a REST implementation each time but I had found no trace of these tools being used together. The only relevant google hits were Steve Vinoski's twitter and his github experiment.
I am fairly new to OTP (and Yaws, web development etc) and I might be missing something. Webmachine is a full OTP application, bundled with Mochiweb so my guess would be that it is an overkill but that's just a shot in the dark.
(I know Cowboy has its own REST implementation too but Yaws is more appealing to me and REST is not always a necessity of course.)
Related
I understand (somewhat) what are differences between monolithic , microservices .
And also what is SOA it is a service consumer/provider architecture and microservice is subset of SOA. and they use Restfull/SOAP APIs to communicate.
So when a a request something he/she does using Rest/SOAP API but how in a Monolithic architecture a client request through which API? I searched all the links/blogs on google, videos on youtube but still I am not clear about this.
Or may be my whole understanding is not correct.
Sounds like you are a bit confused, I would really recommend you picking up a book on the subject.
Monolithic vs micoservice application is more about how you package and deploy your application and in some sense how coupled modules/subsystems are. The extreme example: you always deploy the entire monolithic applications for the smallest possible change, and in the microservice example you just need to make the same change to one service.
Rest API and SOAP are protocols for how (http) messages are passed between client <-> server and has nothing to do with monolithic vs micro.
Monolithic application can of course have public http API's, and it might not be possible for a user (sending request) of that API to tell the architecture style of that application. And why would she care about that?
I think this is a nice start: https://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html
I've been reading around trying to understand what RESTful API is all about. I guess I understood the general outlines and a bit about how it's related to HTTP and all that.
In fact, one of the jobs I recently applied for required a 'must' knowledge of a RESTful API!! The job description was messy anyway and seemed it had been written by an HR person, or somebody who didn't actually have an advanced technical knowledge.
I fail to see how, as a frontend developer / UI/UX designer, I could benefit from the vague RESTful API stuff? What's the connection?! Should really be bothered?
Thanks!
Simple and Precisely NO.
For only a front End Developer; it is not necessary, it is must (or SOAP bases API) for BackEnd Application Developer.
I am Android app Developer, made REST api for my app and my friend is just working on Web Page UI for that APP.!
Ajax calls are little to know for you.!
But one should know little bit about APIs, it never hurts :)
RESTful api, and web services in general, are a way to abstract back ends from front end developpers. It allows front-end developpers to do their interfaces without the need to code any server-side logic.
Web services contain all the business logic. As a front-end developper, you'd need to know how to interact with such services, but the whereabouts of the api call are not required of you to understand.
Finally, it's a way to define clear separation between what the application looks like and what the application does.
REST is a way to think applications. To make short, the client is stateless and you use HTTP methods for what they are designed to in order to interact with your server resources. You also leverage HTTP status codes, media types, content negotiation (Conneg).
If you want to know more about principles of RESTful services and Web API, you could have a look at this link: https://templth.wordpress.com/2014/12/15/designing-a-web-api/.
Hope it helps you,
Thierry
From client perspective the two main differences between REST and other e.g. SOAP webservices, that you have to use stateless communication (so you won't have a server side session, login, logout, etc...) and you have to use hyperlinks as request templates instead of building request from scratch. Because of these constraints your client breaks much harder by API changes.
I've just started on a small project to create some REST services using Google App Engine and Java. I'm new to both technologies, but I've done some reading on both. I'm familiar with SOAP (have used them previously), and I think I understand the conceptual differences between REST and SOAP.
Currently I need info regarding two things:
1) I'm trying to find some tutorial which builds a simple REST service from scratch for deploying on Google App Engine (GAE). The simpler the better, but it should have at least a few routing options. I don't need any UI, if that matters.
2) Which RESTful Framework should I use with Google App Engine. Again, simplicity is what I'd like, and something which has tutorials and a newcomer can easily grasp.
My ultimate goal is to just write a REST wrapper with multiple routing options, which eventual consumes some pre-existing SOAP services and returns their results.
Have you checked out Google Cloud Endpoints for creating a REST service? Its pretty simple and straightforward, also has support for OAuth.
I would give Jello framework a try. It offers a clean, and simple to follow, JSON format and provides a very powerful and comprehensive RESTful implementation that follows the OData specification.
Here is Jello's REST development guide: http://jello-framework.com/guide/rest.html
I've started my degree project, a mobile application suitable for iPhone, Android and (in the near future) Symbian. The server architecture is the following:
web site (for "standard" users);
web service (for mobile connections), based on TomCat and Axis2;
mySQL DB to storage users data.
Surfing across the web, I've read a lot of discussion about the interaction between the iPhone and Web Services, and I've to say that I've not a clear idea of what I can do and what not.
Let's start from the protocol used to retrieve data from the DB: the Android-side application uses SOAP protocol, can I do the same with iPhone? Are there some limitations or problems?
I have also read about the using of REST instead of SOAP, could it be possible with the server architecture described above? Which are the main advantages/disadvantages?
Sorry if these questions sound "n00b", but it's my first real experience with iPhone and the lot of informations found on the web messed up my mind and I'm scared to be confused. Forgive me for any error.
SOAP is simply too heavy for mobile communications. Why do all the work to wrap requests in an additional XML layer you'll have to parse? You send more data than you need to, and impose greater CPU burden on client and server.
Use REST. If you are doing a cross-platform project JSON makes a great payload container, otherwise plists work well for sending data from the server.
You can definitely do SOAP on the iPhone. Here is a nice tutorial on the subject. After all, SOAP is a HTTP based protocol and you have all the libraries you need to do HTTP on the iPhone.
Having said that, RESTful APIs are simpler than SOAP, so you might want to consider them. They're also HTTP based so you won't have any problems on doing that on iPhone. On the server side, if you use Java, you will have to use JAX-RS to implement that part.
Hope it helps.
Google Buffers
If your looking for a language and platform agnostic solution have a look at Google Buffers. You can easily serialise objects for transmission over the wire.
This question should get you started in Objective-C.
JSON
I have also used JSON within iPhone Apps with great success. Again, relatively language and platform agnostic but much simpler than Google Buffers.
SOAP with Fast Infoset is suited for small devices:
JAX-WS 2.0 and its reference implementation support both Fast Infoset and MTOM/XOP. This article includes information about Web Service Performance for Fast Infoset vs. MTOM/XOP:
http://www.devx.com/xml/Article/35385/1954
Fast Infoset is optimized for small
devices that have bandwidth
constraints, and is supported by many
vendors such as Microsoft .NET and
.NET CF, Sun GlassFish, BEA WebLogic,
IBM SDK for Java 6.0 and others.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Infoset
I'm an experienced client application developer (C++/C#), but need to come up to speed quickly on writing server side code to perform RESTful interactions. Specifically, I need to learn how to exchange data with OpenSocial containers via the RESTful API.
The RESTWiki is a very good resource and then there is the classic "How I explained REST to my Wife".
However, don't forget to go read about it directly from the source, it is not as difficult a read as it may first seem.
And I am assuming you will be doing REST over HTTP so this will come in very handy.
Lastly, considering OpenSocial supports the Atom Publishing Protocol, this will be useful.
Enjoy.
RESTful Web Services
I found this this to be a good introduction to RESTful web apps, although it doesn't refer to OpenSocial containers.