Representational State Transfer

Representational State Transfer is also known as REST and RESTful.

There is an ongoing discussion in the standards world whether or not to adopt SOAP or RESTful approaches as the unique truth to achieve interoperable happiness. OSGeo will probably not go either way but look at both and collect some useful information here on these pages.

Introduction

From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REST

Representational State Transfer (REST) is a style of software architecture for distributed hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web. The term was introduced in the doctoral dissertation in 2000 by Roy Fielding,[1], one of the principal authors of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) specification, and has come into widespread use in the networking community.

REST strictly refers to a collection of network architecture principles that outline how resources are defined and addressed. The term is often used in a looser sense to describe any simple interface that transmits domain-specific data over HTTP without an additional messaging layer such as SOAP or session tracking via HTTP cookies. These two meanings can conflict as well as overlap.

Further Reading

• http://blog.geobliki.com/articles/2007/08/06/a-wfs-basic-as-a-geo-atom-store by Patrice Cappelaere

Leonard Richardson, Sam Ruby: RESTful Web Services, Sebastopol, 2007

• ISBN 10: 0-596-52926-0
• ISBN 13: 9780596529260

Excellent introduction to the RESTful architecture. Must-read for web mapping developers.

Commentary by OSGeo members:

• http://crschmidt.net/blog/archives/275/what-rest-is-really-about/
• http://geotips.blogspot.com/2007/08/rest-without-resources.html

Testing and Experimenting

FeatureServer

http://featureserver.org/ with OpenLayers by MetaCarta

Mapbender

The Mapbender project was urged by some customers to look into implementing SOAP bindings for OGC standards because some industries communicated that this is the only way to implement security required for Digital Restrictions Management for geodata. During the developer meeting in May 2007 it was discussed that this can be done once there is funding available and that the project should also look into RESTful approaches. Further information of any results will be made available on the project pages: http://www.mapbender.org/index.php/SOAP_vs_REST