File System Resources

RESTful web services often employ the concept of resources. When reading about RESTful web services, you will often here the term resource or resource-oriented. This is because a key principle of a RESTful system is that of the URI. The unique resource identifier is used to point to some resource, as the name suggests.

The concept of a unique resource identifier says nothing about the context in which it is used. That is, a URI can point to a resource on the web, or it can point to a resource locally on the file system. When using a URI on the local file system, the URIs will only be unique within the local context. For instance, the URI file:///home/ probably isn't unique within the context of the web but would most surely be unique within the local system.

There are two types of resources we are interested in when constructing RESTful applications. There are remote resource that the application might be interested in that live on the web. And, there are local resources the application might be interested in that exist locally within the file system. These two resource types really aren't all that different. The obvious difference of course being the context in which the resource is considered unique. The other difference is at a level lower than that of a RESTful design is how the actual IO functionality is implemented. For instance, you can't perform read operations on remote resource by invoking traditional file system functionality. The same is also true for performing read functionality with remote resources.

One of the similarities between remote resources and local resources is the URI. The URI differs only slightly between the remote resource, typically using HTTP as the protocol, and the local resource which uses a file IO protocol.

Illustrated below is a simple class hierarchy that models a flexible resource. It is flexible in the sense that instantiated resources can be either remote or local in the application.



Here, the base class is Protocol. Inheriting from this class is the base Resource class, with the children resources, File and HTTP. The classes are purposefully incomplete in definition because this hierarchy allows for many implementation variations. The Protocol class is high level and probably serves as an interface. The reason we want to define the Protocol class in the first place is that in this context, where resources may not be using the same protocol, resources may be considered a protocol type.

The Resource class is what should define the higher-level resource functionality. This is where the uniform methods that should be functional for any resource type should be defined. These could map closely to HTTP methods or to some other consistent interface. The File and HTTP class provide the lower level implementations that are invoked by the Resource interface. This enables an application to use resource abstractions, both local and remote, with no regard for context as the behavior can be invoked in a polymorphic way.