Restful Web Services and ADF BC

RESTful Web Services and ADF BC

Hi Guys, Today I'll share about RESTful web services.

RESTful Web Services are basically REST Architecture based Web Services. In REST Architecture everything is a resource. RESTful web services are light weight, highly scalable and maintainable and are very commonly used to create APIs for web-based applications.

In REST architecture, a REST Server simply provides access to resources and REST client accesses and modifies the resources. Here each resource is identified by URIs/ global IDs. REST uses various representation to represent a resource like text, JSON, XML. JSON is the most popular one.

Let's assume that we have a RESTful web service is defined at the location. http://demo.amitspiral.blogspot.com/employee . When the client makes any request to this web service, it can specify any of the normal HTTP verbs of GET, POST, DELETE and PUT. Below is what would happen If the respective verbs were sent by the client.

1. POST – This would be used to create a new employee using the RESTful web service
2. GET - This would be used to get a list of all employee using the RESTful web service
3. PUT - Used to update an existing resource or create a new resource.
4. DELETE - This would be used to delete all employee using the RESTful web service

Let's take a look from a perspective of just a single record. Let's say there was an employee record with the employee number of 1.

The following actions would have their respective meanings.

1. POST – This would not be applicable since we are fetching data of employee 1 which is already created.
2. GET - This would be used to get the details of the employee with Employee no as 1 using the RESTful web service
3. PUT - This would be used to update the details of the employee with Employee no as 1 using the RESTful web service
4. DELETE - This is used to delete the details of the employee with Employee no as 1

Facebook, Twitter, and Google expose their functionality in the form of Restful web services. This allows any client application to call these web services via REST.

In the Fusion web application, ADF REST resources acted on by RESTful web services are backed by view object instances exposed in the data model of the ADF Business Components Model project. ADF Business Components developers working in the ADF Model project can decide on the set of attributes to expose from backing view objects, the actions to make available (both standard CRUD operations and custom methods defined by either a view object interface or view row interface), and the view link relationships to preserve for the resulting resource.

Thanks Guys :)