I am new to REST and watched few videos and read few blogs on REST webservice and I came to know that generally people are using REST for supporting multiple devices like mobile and computer etc.
Now consider I am developing order management system and I want to support both computer as well as tablets. If in m traditional web application, I am using Spring MVC at front end, how REST will fit here so that it will support both the kind of devices.
One more doubt is, whatever examples I have browsed, it return html or json data. I want to develop the application the way spring MVC or struts works like returning name of jsp and jsp will be rendered with dynamic data (instead of returning string represented html).
I hope my question is clear. Please bear me as my questions are vague but I am looking from implementation and design point of view.
Just to start REST isn't anything to do with supporting mobile browsers. It is the architecture pattern HTTP follows. The Web had been REST since the early days.
I'm guessing what you mean is a server that returns light weight JSON that the client renders into HTML rather than the server returning HTML directly to browser. To do that you can use a java script framework that expects JSON data and that has a template engine to generate HTML on the fly in the browser. I think Anglar and Ember work like this.
Though I would only do this if you need to, and you don't need to do this just to support mobile browsers, you can support mobile just by making sure your CSS is responsive.
Related
Let's suppose I was going to design a platform like Airbnb. They have a website as well as native apps on various mobile platforms.
I've been researching app design, and from what I've gathered, the most effective way to do this is to build an API for the back-end, like a REST API using something like node.js, and SQL or mongoDB. The font-end would then be developed natively on each platform which makes calls to the API endpoints to display and update data. This design sounds like it works great for mobile development, but what would be the best way to construct a website that uses the same API?
There are three approaches I can think of:
Use something completely client-side like AangularJS to create a single-page application front end which ties directly into the REST API back-end. This seems OK, but I don't really like the idea of a single-page application and would prefer a more traditional approach
Create a normal web application (in PHP, python, node.js, etc), but rather than tying the data to a typical back end like mySQL, it would basically act as an interface to the REST API. For example when you visit www.example.com/video/3 the server would then call the corresponding REST endpoint (ie api.example.com/video/3/show) and render the HTML for the user. This seems like kind of a messy approach, especially since most web frameworks are designed to work with a SQL backend.
Tie the web interface in directly in with the REST api. For example, The endpoint example.com/video/3/show can return both html or json depending on the HTTP headers. The advantage is that you can share most of your code, however the code would become more complex and you can't decouple your web interface from the API.
What is the best approach for this situation? Do you choose to completely decouple the web application from the REST API? If so, how do you elegantly interface between the two? Or do you choose to merge the REST API and web interface into one code base?
It's a usually a prefered way but one should have a good command of SPA.
Adds a redundant layer from performance perspective. You will basically make twice more requests all the time.
This might work with super simple UI, when it's just a matter of serializing your REST API result into different formats but I believe you want rich UI and going this way will be a nightmare from both implementation and maintainance perspective.
SUGGESTED SOLUTION:
Extract your core logic. Put it into a separate project/assembly and reuse it both in your REST API and UI. This way you will be able to reuse the business logic which is the same both for UI and REST API and keep the representation stuff separately which is different for UI and REST API.
Hope it helps!
Both the first and the second option seem reasonable to me, in the sense that there are certain advantages in decoupling the backend API from the clients (including your web site). For example, you could have dedicated teams per each project, if there's a bug on the web/api you'd only have to release that project, and not both.
Say you're going public with your API. If you're releasing a version that breaks backwards compatibility, with a decoupled web app you'd be able to detect that earlier (say staging environment, given you're developing both in-house). However, if they were tightly coupled they'd probably work just fine, and you'll find out you've broken the other clients only once you release in production.
I would say the first option is preferable one as a generic approach. SPA first load delay problem can be resolved with server side rendering technique.
For second option you will have to face scalability, cpu performance, user session(not on rest api of course because should be stateless), caching issues both on your rest api services and normal website node instances (maybe caching not in all the cases). In most of the cases this intermediate backend layer is just unnecessary, there is not any technical limitation for doing all the stuff in the recent versions of browsers.
The third option violates the separation of concerns, in your case presentational from data models/bussines logic.
I am programming a Symfony2 App. The structure of my Symfony2 app like:
Login (username / password)
Get Survey for this Login / for this User
User input / click answers. After each click a Ajax request save the answer
User submit survey after answering every question
I have no experience with mobile apps like IOS, Android or Windows. The mobile will created by an other team. The question ist quite common, but which steps i must realize? Are there any literature that you can recommend me?
What was the right way to create an API?
How far Symfony2 supports to create an API for this use cases?
Unfortunately I have no experience on REST, but i suspect this is necessary, right?
I look forward to each answer.
Let me state the obvious first, if you start building a project with technologies you don't know enough about, it WILL be a nightmare. So by all means take your time to learn what you need.
REST is the reccomended standard to build an API since it's native http native and it's quite simple and flexible at the same time. There are tons of simple tutorials on REST, starting from Wikipedia, so I won't link them here.
But I'll tell you a secret, a web service can simply be any web page that reply to your requests with structured data. I.e. even a non-REST series of "webpages" the reply with JSON data can be defined a web service.
By now you see that you can easily do that with Symfony. If you already know how to do stuff and show pages with Symfony, only add JSONResponse to the mix , and also the _format routing parameter, and you should be on a good way.
You just create a path (i.e. an action) for whatever the mobile application needs to do. Of course later on you will learn the beauty of REST and refactor your API accordingly, but first thing you build a working system.
Reading this blog post is a good start. Now if your application will only serve API responses there is the very good Symfony REST Edition which already includes all bundles and tools needed to create an API centric application with Symfony2.
You also have the Lionframe framework but I didn't tested it yet.
Using Google App Engine SDK:
webpage: http://hwsejk.appspot.com/
I'm trying to make a web server using java and jsp (it is a web server for an iPhone application). I don't know a lot about java so I'm having a lot of troubles trying to construct a server by myself. For now, I have tried implementing cookie, database, and some other methods. Now that I've given you basic information about my web server, I have a few questions to ask.
Is it the right approach to use java and jsp to make a web server like this? the java servlets get and send user inputs to different jsp pages, which contain some HTML and java code. But I've found some posts here that it's a bad practice to use jsp like this. I don't know how else I can make webpages. Could anyone please recommend the right approach to make a web server (like the one linked above)? I would love to know if there is some kind of a template that I can take a look at.
What you are making doesnt seem to be a "server" at all but rather a "web application" or "web site". The former implies you are creating a piece of sfotware to implement a specific protocol like HTTP, FTP, etc. while the latter is making a series of web pages or and application that runs on server.
You can create a web application in any number of languages, not just Java. From the screenshot you shared i would think that using Rails (Ruby), Django (Paython), or Symfony2 (PHP) would probably get you up and running pretty fast as it looks like you dont need much more than some basic model scaffolding with a pretty face.
If you are familiar with Java you might also want to try the Play! framework...
I would like to build an XML over HTTP provisioning interface using Zend Framework. Should Zend_XmlRpc_Server be used for this purpose? If so, can you recommend any guides on using it? (Specifically the part retrieving incoming XML and parsing it.)
What kind of service is it? - will you send binary data or rather short texts? Will all clients be in PHP mostly or you are foreseeing a wide range of clients?
Usually if you're doing a web-based small service, REST will do the trick, it's easy to develop and consume, even by plain JS frontends, such as jQuery.
If it's something more complex, you can't go wrong with SOAP, though it's a bit complex in developing. Make sure you arm yourself with SoapUI
XmlRPC has some limitations, especially sending binary data. There's some thorough comparison to have a look at this blog
How would I model a system that needs to be able to provide content in a format that would be consumable by iphone, Android or web browser (or whatever). All a new consumer would have to do is build a UI with rules on how to handle the data. I'm thinking something RESTful returning JSON or something.
I'm really looking for suggestions on the kinds of things I'd need to learn in order to be able to implement a system on this scale.
As an ASP.NET MVC developer, would that be the best framework/archetectrue to go with?
Thanks
I think you're on the right track with REST returning JSON. This is a format that's consumable by pretty much any language on any platform.
As an ASP.NET MVC developer, you should have no problems making a web service that's RESTful and passes data via JSON.
iPhone, Android, and modern web browsers such as Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome, have excellent Javascript implementations, splendid CSS, and reasonable subsets of HTML5 -- but you can't use either fact if you also want to support Internet Explorer or other old browsers. Fortunately, Javascript frameworks such as jQuery and dojo can compensate in good part for such issues (I personally prefer dojo, but jquery's more popular, and the choice between two such good frameworks is more of a matter of taste -- plus, there are advantages with going for the popular choice, such as, you can probably get better support on SO;-).
For REST returning JSON, just about any decent server-side arrangement will be fine, so, you may as well stick with what you know best, in your case ASP.NET MVC (just as I'd stick with Python and Werkzeug on App Engine, and people with other server-side preferences would stick with theirs -- ain't gonna matter much;-). Client-side, pick one of the two most popular frameworks, Jquery and Dojo, and go with it -- both have good books if that's your favorite style of study, but also good online resources. (Less-popular frameworks surely have a lot going for them as well, but there are risks in getting far away from popular choices;-).
As a general/philosophical approach, Thin Server Architecture is well worth a look (except for one detail: they used to recommend XML rather than JSON -- dunno if they've seen the light since, but JSON's clearly the right approach so ignore any suggestion to the contrary;-).
I am working on a project now that has to do this very thing. While searching the net on this I found Aleem Bawany's article on how it could be done in ASP.Net MVC. I really like the fact that it uses an action filter to handle the response. I modified the code in his article to look at the extension of the request instead of the content type.
For example /products/1.xml would return the xml representation of the
product whose id is 1 from the database.
Also /products/1.json would return the json representation of the product whose id is 1 from the database.
And /products/1 would return the html representation of the product whose id is 1 from the database.
The nice thing about returning data this way is that it lets the consumer decide how they want to consume the data.