Thursday, September 4, 2008

Building software objects as resources

The term resource oriented architecture often refers to software design in the context of the web. Object design can take this principle into account before the web even needs to be considered. It is, after all, simply an architectural principle used to build a scalable and robust system.

One approach here is to take into account the four most common HTTP methods and implement this functionality in a base class. For example, if we were to implement this in Python, we might implement a base class that define these methods. But these methods may be abstract, not intended to actually do anything.

class Resource:
def get(self, *args, **kw):
pass

def put(self, *args, **kw):
pass

def post(self, *args, **kw):
pass

def delete(self, *args, **kw):
pass
In this case, other resources in your system would inherit from Resource and define the behavior of these methods. The key idea here being that you are building a resource oriented architecture at a level of abstraction that is not concerned with the web at all. This is powerful because it lets the developer shift the application code from framework to framework.

The actual code that deals with web requests is simple. It says "I got a GET request for this resource. Application, what should I tell the client?". And the application can easily respond in a way that makes sense to the framework. Not only that framework, but possibly others as well.

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