Andrej Koelewijn

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.