We are trying to rebuild an app using Backbone or Angular JS. Main criteria for selecting either of them would be:
The Java script Framework should be able to make calls via SOAP as well as REST.
My question is based on the criteria's which framework should I be choosing? I know angular as well as Backbone are good for REST web service. I am not really sure how well they do when we are trying to make SOAP calls. Not much help online either. Has anyone successfully implemented SOAP calls via Angular or Backbons JS?
Backbone.sync method can be easily overriden to make SOAP calls, but it will fall apart if your SOAP service manages anything else than resources, as REST calls in Backbone are made on behalf of either models or collections of models that support the classic CRUD semantics. As for AngularJS, I haven't used it enought to provide you with an informed answer.
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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.
Why would one like to integrate JAX-RS(Jersey) using Rest API to Struts2? Struts2 is itself a mvc framework, so why would anyone want to integrate these both? If combined, how will the resulting framework be(I wanted to know if REST API just control the controller part of MVC).
There is a RESTful plugin called struts2-rest-plugin that has been included with the framework since version 2.1.1. A fair amount of information on the plugin can be found here.
Essentially, the plugin uses a custom action mapper that examines the request and based upon the HTTP Method used in conjunction with the URI, it dispatches the request to one of several different method names (e.g. GET /movies dispatched to index() method of action).
Just because Struts2 is an action-based framework does not mean a RESTful solution cannot be included as an alternative for developers. Spring MVC offers similar solutions themselves and it is also an action-based framework.
If you consider your JSON response as your view, you'll see that the fact that Struts2 is based on MVC design makes logical sense. Your model is simply the data structure you are returning to the client and your controller is the action.
Consider reading the link above on the plugin and you'll get a better picture of how the two can be integrated. If you want to return JSON but don't necessarily want to offer RESTful URLs in your Struts2 application, you can also consider the JSON plugin, found here.
I am not sure about Struts2, but in the past Struts1 did not have a "Rest" adapter built in. Jersey provides the cool #annotations that will easily serialize your datamodel and will push you in a "Restful" direction. Jersey does not provide an MVC framework as much as it provides convenience methods to work in a Restful/resource based way.
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 want to implement REST service in gwt .But I don't know how to go about it. I read some documents where they have implemented it using RestyGwt and jercy. But I have one app which is deployed on tomcat. Then situation is that my client side app is calling the methods on the application present on tomcat.
I have to implement it using REST so that my client side call will first go to Proxy service on client then it make REST call to the application on tomcat and fetch result and return. How can I do this in gwt. ?
As mentioned, you can only communicate with REST service.
Anyway, maybe take a look on dispatch concept in GWTPlatform and their way of implementing it. (https://github.com/ArcBees/GWTP/wiki/Rest-Dispatch).
Idea is easy, you have an action on client side which is registered to deal with rest url. You can define action interface with some additional annotations to tell what is excepected to be send and received. They are using piriti library for json serialization.
It is up to you if you need only client side implementation or you would like to use server side service creation too.
You can NOT implement a REST service in gwt, since gwt is thought as a client-side solution.
What the GWT kit provides for server side are a few utilities to facilitate the comunication between client-side and server-side when both are written in java (RPC, RF).
So you can consume a REST service from gwt (RequestBuilder, gwtquery-ajax, etc), but if you want to provide REST services you need a 3party solution for your server side like Jersey, CXF, etc.
There are, though, 3party solutions which provides the server side and client simultaneously like restygwt, errai-jax, etc.
If you are looking for a simple and reliable solution to query rest services from the client, in this question you have a client implementation done with gwtquery (ajax, databinding, promises)
From all the various examples of Ember.js, I have not been able to figure out if there is a default method in Ember.js to do REST AJAX calls. Many examples build their own interfaces for CRUD operations. I even tried to sift through the code to find any reference to AJAX calls but came up with nothing.
So, my question is, is there a default implementation of REST API in Ember.js. If yes, how do I use it? Also if, for a specific application, I want to build custom CRUD methods, where do I plug these into Ember.js?
It seems that Ember Data is what you are looking for. It is part of emberjs organiztion in GitHub.
[2014-02-18: Deprecated - I no longer support ember-rest because it is overly simplistic, and would recommend using ember-data for most ember projects. Check out the Ember guides for an overview of ember-data as well as this example project ]
While learning Ember, I decided to create a very simple Ember REST library. I also wrote an example Rails CRUD app.
My goals were to keep this project as simple as possible, while still including error handling and validation. Ember REST is certainly much leaner than Ember Data and Ember Resource, and I hope you'll find the code well commented and accessible.
There is a Ember Resource library aiming REST JSON interfaces. It provides Ember.Resource class with save(), fetch() and destroy() operations that could be easily overriden. Looks like it should be more mature than Ember Data for now.
Ember.js can work nicely with Ember Data. That said, there is a specific format of REST to follow. When followed, you can streamline the process of connecting API with Ember and have so much less work.
In case you use custom REST, the place to adjust is:
adapter - to inform from where you like to get data
serializer - how data should be adjusted for custom REST API