I just uploaded the slides of our JSpring presentation to slideshare:
“REST, het internet als database”.
Like most of my presentations, there’s not much text on the slides, so
i’ll summarize here:
- We start with one slide of JAX-RS code, just to mention that we’re
not going to talk about code.
- Next, we mention Stefan Tilkovs summary of RESTfull HTTP. He has
summarized REST in 5 points.
- Unfortunatelly, most people interpret REST as the easy way to do Web
Services. However, REST introduces a new way to build distributed
systems: distributed data (resources). This is a real alternative to
Message Queuing or Remote Procedure Calls (Web Services).
- Next an example of how a distributed system based on webservices can
be translated to a REST architecture.
- There’s a lot of potential for distributed data models that span
multiple organizations, for example government data or health care
data.
- Tim Berners Lee also stresses the value of LinkedData, a bit of
video from TED: The next Web of open, linked data.
- RDF is the next step: add semantics to your data. You can also
add semantics to data in xhtml pages using RDFa.
- Hans Rosling’s TED presentation gives a great example why it’s
valuable to have raw data available: Debunking third-world myths
with the best stats you’ve ever seen.
- What about Query Engines? How are you going to find information in
all this Data?
- One good example is Yahoo Query Engine: a web application to
find information in resources on the web.
- Another interesting query engine in SPARQL, enabling you to
query RDF resources.
- A trend we’re currently seeing is that query engines will be
separated from data storage, unlike traditional RDBMSes that combine
data storage and Query Engine. REST will be the generic interface to
data.
- This will allow for standardized distribution tools. Currently every
organization that needs external data has a custom solution to
duplicate the data inside the organization, so that it can be
queried easily.
- And finally, another improvement of REST is that it can make your
data findable, by enabled search engines to crawl your data by
following the links in your resources.