restian

RESTianThe goal of the RESTian project is multi-faceted and influenced by the immortal words of Alan Kay "We aim to make simple things simple and complex things possible." Its first goal will be to create a Framework for building RESTful Web Services and its latter goal will be to define a Service Interface Schema for RESTful Web Services.

Initial ImplementationThe initial implementation languages are JavaScript for the client and PHP v4 on MySQL for the server. The initial target platform for testing and example services is Drupal v5.x. The initial content types for request and response are "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" and JSON, respectively.

REST FrameworkThe initial goal is to create a framework for both clients and servers optimized for rapid and easy development of fully RESTful Web Services that can be reasonably easily evolved to be fully robust without requiring a change to the externally-facing service interface. RESTian will initially aim to streamline creating CRUD-based operations for SQL databases as well as services using purpose-built functions and will hopefully later look to simplify interface with other back-ends(1).

REST Service Interface SchemaThe longer term goal will be to identify the schema required to drive RESTful web services that can be represented in practically any language and that can easily be transformed between languages formats. The schema will provide necessary information to (almost) any language capable (2) of serving dynamic content via HTTP and a subset of the schema will provide the necessary information to allow clients to make requests of the same RESTful web services thus satisfying the "hypermedia as the engine of application state" requirement.

The initial implementation format for this schema will be JSON and it will be specified by the developer on a path segment heirarchical basis allowing for inheritance of specification and will hopefully later be available in a variety of formats(3).

FootnotesOther back-ends could include interfaces to CouchDb, Amazon's SimpleDB and S3, Flickr, YouTube, and more. Server languages to hopefully also include Python, Perl, Ruby, JavaScript, VBScript, [http://www.java.com/en/ Java, C#, VB.NET, Cold Fusion, and more. Formats to hopefully include (X)HTML+Microformats, XML, RSS, AtomPub, YAML, and more.