Thursday, March 19, 2009

The need for a REST interface in object-oriented applications

REST is a set of design criteria used for designing web-centric architectures. Much of the HTTP protocol incorporates ideas found in REST such as being connectible, resources, and a uniform interface. This uniform interface consists of methods that can operate on resources such as GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE. These are the most common method employed by RESTful applications. The idea of resources states that each resource within a system is uniquely addressable. In fact, this is also part of the uniform interface found in RESTful designs. Many web clients, other than the web browser, use SOAP as the message transformation framework. However, SOAP is not as flexible as a RESTful design and yet there exist many clients and client libraries, in several languages for SOAP services. There are also RESTful clients and client libraries, although, no nearly as many. By the very nature of a RESTful design, objects in an object-oriented system map well to resources of a RESTful architecture. Perhaps developers should keep this in mind and have classes provide a RESTful interface.

What would a RESTful object-oriented interface look like? That is, what would the methods and attributes be? The first step to implementing a REST interface would be define methods that map to the HTTP methods. For example, consider the following example.
#Example; A RESTful Python interface.

class REST(object):
def GET(self):
raise NotImplementedError("GET()")

def POST(self):
raise NotImplementedError("POST()")

def PUT(self):
raise NotImplementedError("PUT()")

def DELETE(self):
raise NotImplementedError("DELETE()")

Here, we have a Python class called REST. This class defines the GET(), POST(), PUT(), and DELETE() HTTP methods. Each method, when invoked will raise a NotImplementedError exception because this class is meant to be an interface. For a class to provide this interface, it would inherit from this class and redefine all methods, providing an implementation. What about attributes? If a instance of REST were to act as a proxy to some RESTful resource, it would need to know its URI. So uri would be a good candidate for an interface attribute. There are many other meta-data attributes associated with the HTTP protocol they we aren't concerned with here. What we want to highlight is the REST interface developers could potentially use when designing objects. On the topic of attributes, another question springs to mind. What about resource attributes. If all we know about a particular resource is the methods it supports and its uri, how can we represent the resource in the context of an object-oriented system? This would most likely be another interface that we would use in conjunction with the REST interface, used to interpret the representation of the remote resource. An alternative is to use WADL to define what resources should look like. However, WADL is too much like SOAP. The rigidity involved defeats the purpose of a RESTful architecture.

The REST interface discussed so far is really only useful as a proxy to a remote resource. That is, the object we are designing that provides this interface would use this interface to make an HTTP request to the HTTP server providing the resource. An analog would be the web browser application providing the REST interface and invoking the GET() method to retrieve a web page.

The "REST" interface could also be the resource itself. If the developer is designing an object-oriented HTTP web application, they could design object within that system, exposed to the web, that provide the REST interface. The method information is always encoded in the HTTP request, otherwise it wouldn't be HTTP. If the base HTTP server forwards this request to an object that provides this interface, that object will always know what to do with the request. This same object can also act as a proxy and so on, forming a chain of RESTful resources.

However, as with all distributed computing, this chain of resources poses a design challenge. How does the system manage new resource locations? If the system is to scale at all, it will need to. However, this problem will come down the road. Right now, the problem is the RESTful implementation at the design level in object-oriented systems. With a RESTful interface, these problems would be much easier to solve.

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